lj i

THE HISTORY OF ROME.

1.-1
 Printed by

Jame• Kay, Jun. & Brother,.

l2'J Chestnut Street.

 THE

HISTORY OF ROME.

BY

G. B. NIEBUHR.

TRANSLATED BY

JULIUS CHARLES HARE, M.A.

AND

CONNOP THIRLWALL, M.A.

FELLOWS OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

VOL. I.
HRS'f AMERICAN FROM THE LONDON EDITION.

PHILADELPHIA:

THOMAS WARDLE, 11 MINOR STREET.

, MDCCCXXXV.
 ;o, '-1-03
Ceterwn, si, omisso optimo illo et perfectissimo genere eloquentim, eli­
gend11. sit forma dicendi, malim, hercule, C. ·Gracchi impetum 11.ut L. Crassi
maturitatem, quam cll.lamistros Mmcenatis aut tinnitus Gllllionis.
TACITUS, Dial. de Ora«rrilru.s.
 TO HIS MAJESTY

FREDERIC WILLIAM THE THIRD,

KING OF PRUSSIA,

THIS WORK·

IS MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.

A HISTORY of Rome, set forth with truth and vividness,

in broad and clear outlirws, free from the incumbrance of
multifarious details, might be esteemed no less worthy to
engage the attention of a prince, than profound and compre­
hensive descriptions of the most important epochs of modern
times. Not so, critical investigations into the dark periods of
remote antiquity; not so, a work which, while it approaches
close to particular objects that it may examine them, is seldom
able to take its stand where rich and wide prospects expand
before the eye.

But gratitude inspires courag1.1 and in this feeling I ven­

tured to solicit your Majesty'sfgracious permission for the
dedication of this work.

Your Majesty's favour has affor<led me the happiest leisure:

it enabled me to become familiar with Rome : and the two
Universities-that of Berlin, the opening of which led to my
undertaking this work, 1lnd that of Bonn, to which it is my
 vi

pride to belong as a free associate-are your Majesty's noble

creations.
•
Thus this history owes its existence to the Gracious King,
to whom I devote it, with feelings faithful as those of a native
subject, and with a lively recollection of every favour with
which your Majesty has distinguished me.
 PREFACE.

THE History of Rome was treated, during the first two cen­
turies after the revival of letters, with the same pwstration of
the understanding and judgment to the written letter that had
been handed down, and with the same fearfulness of going
beyond it, which prevailed in all the other branches of know~
ledge. If any had pretended to.examine into the credibility of
the ancient writers and the value of their testimony, an outcry
would have been raised against such atrocious presumption.
The object aimed at was, in spite of everything like internal
evidence, to combine what was related by them : the utmost
that was done was to make one authority in some one parti­
cular instance give way to another, as mildly as possible, and
without leading.to any further results. Here and there indeed
an independent mind; like Glareanus, broke through this
fence; but inevitably a sentence of condemnation was forth­
with pronounced against him : besides the men who did so
were not the most learned ; and their bold attempts were not
carried with, consistency throughout. Jn this department, as
in others, men of splendid abilities and the most copious learn­
ing conformed to the narrow spirit of their age : their labours
extracted from a multitude of insulated details, what the
remains of ancient literature did not afford united in any single
work, a systematic account of Roman antiquities: what they
did in this respect is wonderful. And this is sufficient to earn
them imperishable fame : for he. that would blame their not
being more independent of their age, is blind to the common lot
·of mortals, from which none but the favourites of the gods are
viii PREFACE.
exempt; and they mostly have to pay for this blessing by per­
secution. 'On the other hand in the way of history strictly so
called little was produced,-<lry compilations concerning the
times where the books of Livy were lost, and detatched obser­
vations which led to nothing beyond.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century Philology
entered upon a kind of middle state between the period of her
earlier greatness within her exclusive sphere,-where, having
accomplished whatever was to be accomplished in this manner,
she consequently fell into decay,-and that of a new, richer,
and more comprehensive greatness, for which she was to be
indebted to the developement of other sciences, although for a
while they overshadowed her : this like all middle states was
one of uneasiness and depression. Bentley, and a: few more,
who were in part the crea.tori:l of the new age, in part the pre­
servers of the knowledge the old one had left behind, stood as
giants amid a generation of dwarfs. Intellect and science
during that century were everywhere coming out of their
nonage: men were taught by great examples to look things
in the face, and to pursue their researches with freedom ; to
regard the books, which till then had made up the scholar's
whole world, as merely pictures of a part of the living universe
which could not be directly approached ; to exercise their own
understanding, their own reason, their own judgment in every­
thing. Nor was the field of Roman history left unvisited by
this youthful spirit of freedom : it is undoubtedly to the per­
vading activity which prevailed during the latter part of that
century, that we owe the first work which, while it discusses
an abundance of details, enters into a general examination of
what this history is and may be made : I mean the masterly
inquiries of Perizonius; a book which, like other products of
genius, is unsurpassed and classical in the kind wherein it was
the first.·· However though we here feel the breath of that
spirit which in those days was everywhere awakening, Perizo­
n1us had advanced far beyond his age; and Bayle, who twelve
year~ after poinred out the contradictions and impossibilities
 PREFACE. ix

contained in a· few portions of the eatliest history of Rome,

makes no use and takes no notice of him: neitlrnr does Beau­
fort, although his sole attention was directed to that object
which Bayle merely fixed his eyes on for a few hours, among
a thousand others of the same kind.
Beaufort was ingenious, and had read much, though he was
not a philologer: one or two sections in his treatise are very
able and satisfactory, others on the contrary feeble and super­
ficial. Bayle is the master whom he implicitly follows through­
out : the soul of his book is scepticism : be does nothing but
deny and upset: or, if he ever tries to build, the edifice is frail
and untenable. Yet the influence and reputation of his book
spread extraordinarily : for Roman hist~ry had almost entirely
escaped the attentton and care of philologers; those who ch~efly
interested themselves about it, though not more so than about
that of other nations, were intelligent men of the world; and
for their use it was at that time handled by several authors,
without pretensio.ns or view to learning and research. Such of
these as did not wholly overlook the earlier ,centuries, under
the notion that they were of no importance, wer~ so satisfied
with Beaufort's inquiry as to give them up altogether. Gib­
bon's history, which even in a philological point of view is a
noble masterwork, left this region untouched.
The end of the last century was the opening of a new era
for Germany. Men were no longer satisfied with superficial
views in any field of knowledge; rngue empty words lost their
currency: but neither was the work of destruction, which had
given pleasure to the preceding age, in its anger against the
continuance of an authority founded only on usurpation, any
longer held to be sufficient: my countrymen strove after.defi­
nite and positive knowledge, like their forefathers; but it was
after true knowledge, in the room of that imagi.nary know­
ledge which had been overthrown. \Ve had now a literature,
worthy of our nation and our language : we had Lessing
and Goethe: and this literature comprised, what none had yet
done, a great part of the Greek and Roman authors, not iu mere
J.-2 '
x PREFACE.

copies, but as it were reproduced. For this advantage Ger­

many is indebted to Voss, whom our late posterity niust extol
as their benefactor: with whom a new age for the knowledge
of antiquity begins; since he succeeded in eliciting out of the
classical writers what they are wont to presuppose, their no­
tions of the earth, for instance and of the gods, their ways .of
life and their household habits: and understood and interpreted
Homer and Virgil, as if they were our contemporaries, only
separated from us by an interval of space. His example
wrought upon many : upon me, ever since my childhood, it
has been enforced by personal encouragement fi:om this old
friend of my father.
Previous ages had been content to look at the ancient histo­
riaos in the way many look at maps or landscapes, as if they
were all in all; without ever attempting to employ them as
the:only remaining means for producing an image of the objects
they represent: but now a work on such subjects could not .be
esteemed satisfactory, unless its clearness and distinctness
enabled it to take its stand beside the history of the present
age. And the time was one when we were witnessing many
unheard of and incredible events: when our attention was at­
tracted to many forgotten and decayed institutions by the sound
of their downfall; and our hearts were strengthened by danger,
as we became familiar with its threats, and by the passionate in­
tensity given to our attachment to our princes and our country.
At that time philology in Germany had already reached that
height, which is now the boast of our nation. It had recog-·
nized its calling, to. be'the mediator between the remotest ages,
to afford us the enjoyment of preserving through thousands of
years an unbroken identity with the noblest and greatest nations
of the ancient world; by familiarizing us, through the medium
of grammar and history, with the works of their minds and the
course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf that divided
us from them.
In this manner, although Greek literature long possessed an
almost exclusive preference, the ,criticnl treatment of Roman
 PREFACE. xi

history, the discovery of the forms of the constitution which

had till then been misunderstood, was a fruit that time had been
maturing: and a multitude of fortunate circumstances com­
bined to foster its growth. It was a time full of hope, when
the university of Berlin opened: and the enthusiasm and de­
light in which months rolled away, while the contents of the
first volumes of this histor~ were digested for lectures, and
worked up for publication ;-to have enjoyed this, and to have
lived in 1813,-this of itself is enough to make a man's life,
. notwithstanding much sad experience, a happy one.
In this state of delight the meaning of many an ancient
mystery disclosed itself: but yet more were overlooked : in
much I erred : a still greater part was left in a disjointed con­
dition feebly supported by proofs. For my knowledge was the
unsatisfactory knowledge of one who had been !Oelf-taught, and
who as yet had only been able to devote such hours to study
as he could withdraw from business: and I had reached my
.mark like a man walking in his sleep along a battlement.
That these defects, and the overhasty composition of the first
volume, which had compelled me to introduce sundry correc­
tions in the sequel of the work itself, did not hinder its recep­
tion being on the whole very favourable, is a proof that the
revival of Roman history was in accord with the spirit of the
age : · nay our age may discern itself to be immediately called
io>y Providence to this inquiry, inasmuch as, within the eleven
years since it commenced, three new and rich sources .have
been opened to us by the publication of Lydus, Gaius, and
Cicero's Republic: whereas centuries had previously elapsed
without adding to om means of knowledge.
·To these defects of my work I was far from blind : the points
however attacked by those who criticised it, were by no means
the weak ones, but often the soundest and strongest. ;My be­
ing aware. of these faults, and desirous to make use of the new
discoveries, was the main reason which re.larded the continua­
tion: · for it was ncessary that, before I proceeded~ the first
volume should be written anew. Meanwhile I was living in
xii PREFACE.

Italy, and being at Rome was too much taken up in gazing

and receiving impressions to work with energy at books. Be­
sides I fancied I should never be able to proceed without the hap­
piness I had once enjoyed, when the point on which an inquiry
hinged would come forward into a clear light while I was con­
versing with Savigny, and I found. it so easy to ask many a
question, so cheering to complete an embryo thought and to
try its worth. On my return to Germany I. drew up the plan
of the third volume, preparing the way for it by remodelling the
first, and correcting the second.
This new edition, in which it has been my aim to make all
the proofs and solutions satisfactory, required very extensive
labours: but as all labour is lightened when new springs of
activity are imparted, so this was mainly promoted by my lec­
tures on Roman antiquities last winter. The words of Pyrrhus
to his Epirots-Ye are iny wings-express the feeling of a zeal­
ous teacher toward hearers whom he loves, and whose whole
souls take part in his discourse. Not only are his researches
promoted by the endeavour to make himself clear to them, and
to utter nothing as truth which can admit of a doubt: the
sight of them assembled before him, the personal relation in
which he stands to them, awaken.a thousand thoughts while
he is speaking: and how different a thing is it to write down
words which had previously· been poured forth as the fresh
thoughts prompted them!
The work I here lay before the public is, as the first glance
will show, an entirely new one, in which scarcely a few frag­

ments of the former have been incorporated. It would have

been far easier to preserve the groundwork of the first edition;

I resolved on the more difficult task, as the most expedient,

from its giving unity and harmony to the whole. That whole,

. made up of this and the next two volumes, is the work of a

man in his maturity; whose powers may decline, but whose

convictions are thoroughly settled, who1>e views cannot change:

and accordingly I wish that the former edition may be regarded

as a youthful work. · Our friends are ofteu more tender-hearted

 PREFACE. Xlll

toward us than we are ourselves: and perhaps one or two may

regret some things that have been destroyed and cast away:
more than once it was with a lingering hand that I overthrew.
the old edifice: but what was built on suppositions ascertained
to be wrong, could not be permitted to remain; n~r was it al­
lowable to .preserve it by slipping some other prop under, so as
to efface the appearance of the original foundation.
The further continuation down to the term I have now set
before me, I may, if it please God and his blessing abide with
me, confidently promise; although the progress may be but
slow. It is the work of my life; which is to preserve me a
· name not unworthy of my father's: I will not lazily abandon it.
When a historian is reviving former times, his interest in
them and sympathy with them will be the deeper, the greater
the events he has witnessed with a bleeding or a rejoicing heart.
His feelings are moved by justice or injustice, by wisdom or folly,
by c'oming br departing greatness, as if all were going on be­
fore his eyes: and when he is thus moved his lips speak,
although Hecuba is nothing to the player. Would it were·
acknowledged that the perfect distinctness and clearness of
such a vision destroys the power of obscure ideas and indefinite
. words! that it precludes the silly desire of transferring. out of
ages, of a totally different character what would now be alto­
gether inapplicable: that, to retain the poet's simile, it precludes
fools fro~ coming forward as knight-errants, to avenge the sor­
rows of Hecuba. If any one, after being reminded of this,
'.
persists in misapprehending my meaning, he must be dishonest,
or at least very simple. Of the principles on which the politi­
cal opinions in my work are formed, there is not one that may
not be found in Montesquieu o~ Burke: and the proverb, quien
hace aplicaciones, con su pan se lo coma, is enough.
It is with a solemn feeling that I close this preface with the
words which fifteen years ago closed that of the first edition:
the repetition of them "brings back the images of joyous days,
and much-loved shades rise up before my son!."
There is an inspiration which proceeds from the pre;;;ence
XIV PREFACE.

and the converse of beloved friends; an immediate action upon·

our minds, whereby the Muses are revealed to ourview,awaken­
ing joy and strength in us, and purging our sight: to thi~ my
whole life long I have owed whatever was best in me. Thus
it is to the friends in the midst of whom I returned to studies
long resigned or faintly pursued, that I owe the result if it has
been auspicious. Therefore do I bless the beloved memory of
my departed Spalding: therefore too allow me openly to ex­
press my thanks to you, Savigny, Bultmann, and Heindor.f, ·
without whom and without our deceased friend I should cer­
tainly never have had the courage to t1ndertake this work,
without whose affectionate sympathy and eulivening presence
it would hardly have been accomplished.
BoNN, December 8, 1826.
 Xl'

I HAVE undertaken to relate the history of Rome: I shall begin

in the night of remote antiquity, where the most laborious researches
can scarcely discern a few of the chief members of ancient Italy by
the dim light of late and dubious traditions ; and I wish to come
down to those times when, all that we have seen spring up and
grow old in the long course of centuries being buried. in ruins or in
the grave, a second night envelopes it in almost equal obscurity.
. This history in its chief outlines is universally known, and by
very many, at least in part, immediately from the classical works
of Roman authors, so. far as their remains supply us with a repre- .
sentation of many of the most brilliant or memorable periods of re­

publican and imperial Rome. If the whole of these works were

extant, and we possessed a continuous narrative in the histories of

Livy and Tacitus, extending, with the exception of the last years

of Augustus, from the origin of the city down to N erva, it would be

presumptuous and idle to engage in relating the same eyents with

those historians: presumptuous, because the beauty of their style

must ever lie beyond our reach ; and idle, because, over and above

the historical instruction conveyed, it would be impossible to have

a companion through life better fitted to fashion the mind in youth,

and to preserve it in afterage from the ·manifold barbarizing influ·

ences of our circumstances and relations, than such a copious his­

tory of eight hundred and fifty years written by the Romans for

themselves. We should only 'want to correct the misrepresenta­

tions during the earlier ages, and to sever the poetical ingredients

from what is historically sure and well grounded: and without pre­

sumptuously appearing to vie with the old masters, we might draw

a simple sketch of the constitution, and of the changes it underwent

at particular times where Livy leaves us without information or

'misleads us. But as those works are only preserved in frairments ;,

 xvi

as they. are silent concerning periods in the importance of their

events perhaps still more prominent than thoi;ie which we see living
in their pages ; as the histories of those periods executed by mo­
derns are unsatisfactory and often full of error ; I have deemed it
expedient to promote the knowledge of Roman history by devoting
a course of lectures to it. A doubt might be entertained whether
it were better to give a connected narrative, or merely to treat of the
portions where we are left without those two historians. I have
determined in favour of the former plan; trusting that I shall not
lead any of my hearers to fancy he may dispense with studying
the classical historians of Rome, when he has gained a notion of
the events which they pourtray, and hoping that I may render the
study easier and more instructive.
Much of what the Roman historians set down in the annals of
their nation must be left out by ·a modern from that mass of events
wherein their history far surpasses that of every othe:r: people.
Under this necessity of passing over many things, and ·or laying
down a rule for my curtailments, I shall make no mention of such
persons and events as have left their names a dead letter behind
them without any intrinsic greatness or important external results;
although a complete knowledge of every particular is indispensable
to the scholar, and many a dry waste locks up sources which sooner
or later he may succeed in drawing forth. On the other hand I
.shall endeavour to . examine the history, especially during the first
:five centuries, not under the guidance of dim feelings but of search­
ing criticism: nor shall I merely deliver the results, which could
only give birth to blind opinions, but the researches themselves at
full length : I shall strive to lay open the groundworks of the an­
cient Roman people and state, which have been built over and
masked, and about which the old writers preserved t~ us are often
utterly mistaken; to execute justice in awarding praise and blame,
love and hatred, where party-spirit has given birth to misrepresen­
tations and thereby to false judgments after upward of two thou.
sand years ; to represent the spreading of the empire, the growth
of the constitution, the state of the administration, of manners, and
of civility, according as from time to time we are able to survey
them. I shall exhibit the characters of the men who were mighty
in their generation for goo<l or for evil, or who at leas't distinguished ·
 xvii

themselves above their fellows. I shall relate the history of the

wars with accuracy, wherever they .do not offer a mere recurring
uniformity, and, so far as our information will allow, shall draw a
faithful and distinct portrait of the nations that gradually came
within the widening sphere of the Roman power. Moreover I shall
consider the state of literature at its principal epochs, taking notice
of the lost as well as the extant writers.
When Sallust, after much bitter aflliction endured in the service
of the state, resolved to withdraw from public life, and returning
with a composed mind to his favourite pursuits undertook to relate
certain passages in the history of his country*, he found it neces­
sary to prove to his fellow-citizens-:-for only some few solitary
Greeks and a small number of western Europeans read Latin-that
the deeds of the Romans were not eclipsed by those of the Greeks.
A century earlier Polybius had endeavoured, but probably in vain,
to s.et before the eyes of his countrymen how far the greatness of
Rome went beyond everything that history had previously known,
and that too not merely nor chiefly from the extent of her empire.
That the Greeks, even if they had not been blinded by animosity
and hatred against their foreign conquerors, should. have thought
slightingly of a history devoid at that time of the grace and life of
eloquent narrative, which embellished the exploits of their own an­
cestors, and without which even the most eventful recorded story
can no more be fully felt than a lyrical poem without a musical ac-.
companiment,-this was the natural result of their lively, airy
character, and their entire devotion to beauty. It is remarkable
however that among the literary public of Rome, whose approbation
Sallust wished to gain, overbeai:ing as the Homan national pride
was, the same tone of feeling and complete ignorance of their fore­
fathers' greatness prevailed. Yet, strange as this may appear, it
may be explained without difficulty : and he himself has given us
the solution, under the silent conviction no doubt that with his his­
tory a new state of feeling would arise among the Romans. At
that time with the exception of Cato's Origins, which must have
had the same charm of raciness as the best of our old chronicles,

* Cati!. 1v.
I.-3
 X\'111

they found no historian in their own language readable"'. And

certainly the chief part of them may have been exceedingly mea­
gre and tame. But even the honest good faith of the ancient wri­
ters was incapable of affording enjoyment in those days, when the
readers at Rome had totally lost all relish for simplicity, being
trained solely in the study of Greek literature, and having their
minds formed not by its noble classical works, but by the glitter
and tinsel of a degenerate style, full of point and ingenuity, which
at that time was the fashion among the Greeks, the teachers and
living models .they were familiar with. As the poets rescued the
heroes of old from the night of oblivion, so did that great national '
l1istorian, whom Sallust preceded, rescue the deeds and the great
men of Rome. It is hardly too much to affirm that Livy first taught
the Romans what a history they had. Their great actions and vic­
tories were now encircled by the graces of his bewitching style with
the noblest ornaments of republican and civic virtues,-heightened
through his wish ofbcholdingiu the times of his ancestors the remains
of the brazen age coming down almost to his own days ;-with a gra­
vity and a dignity which surpassed the great men of Athens with
their unconcealed human failings and weaknesses, and threw them
into the shade, as much as the conquest of vast empires and fierce
nations did the passionate struggles between petty republics : for
the wonders of the Persian war soon passed with the Romans for
an impudent fablet. The middle ages and Italy on its regenera­
tion, being unacquainted with the attractions of the Greek histo­
rians, bestowed all their admiration on the history of Rome: as if
fate had meant to make amends to her ancient heroes for the indiffer­
ence of their posterity in the age which had been drawn away
from them by a foreign literature. There is little learning, but only
the more simplicity and sincerity, in the reverence with which the
Italians of the middle ages at the dawn of learning pronounced the .
great names of Rome: perhaps they only felt the more intimate
with them, because without refining, without regarding the differ­
ence of manners and times, they invested their noble spirits with

• Cicero de leg. 1. 2, 3: where even Cato is not exempted from the gene•
ral condemnation.
I Who dues not remember Juve1ial's jeer?
 xix

the relations and almost with the forms of their own contemporaries
and fellow-countrymen; just as they viewed the imperial power of
their own days as an unaltered continuation of the empire of the
Cresars. In Dante's eyes Virgil was a Lombard, as e\-en later the
painters pourtrayed the Romans in the dress of their own times~
the people honoured Virgil's tomb and his memory, as that of a
powerful and beneficent magician. Even Petrarch, and he no
doubt consciously, cherishes the delusion that the unity of the na­
tion was unbroken except by time: he looks on Stefano Colonna as
an old patrician, and on Rienzi as a tribune of the people. It was
not till the following century that antiquity was disentangled from
this confusion with the present time : and as every germ was then
expanding with prodigious vigour, a few of the learned speedily
gained the most distinct and liveliest view of the character of an­
cient Rome which we can hope on the whole to attain to, much as
has since been brought to light which may furnish us with more
accurate information. Since the time of Sigonius however the his­
tory of ancient Rome has owed but little to scholars : it escaped
from their hands, and fell, in a few fortunate cases, into those oC
great statesmen ; but mostly of ordinary historians.
One must not disguise from oneself that during the last two cen­
turies, instead of gaining in distinctness and completeness, it has
rather lost. The old Italian philologers, whose whole being was
impregnated with the spirit of ancient Rome, and who were inspired
with something like a faculty of divination even by the classica~
ground they trod on, had framed an idea of' the ruined building
from its fragments, and in clearing away the rubbish had restored
it in their minds. The want of this idea injured the works of those
who wrote on Roman history as politicians; and thus the history
itself was corrupted. Of this Machiavel's Discorsi, though so full
of subtile and profound remarks, are a signal instance; since he
talks, al ways indeed most ingeniously, but very often of things
which never existed. I mention him in this place, because, though
he lived in an age when philological learning was at its height, he
was always a stranger to its spirit. Montesquieu, with pretensions
to accurate historical infoimation, and tl1erefore likelier to do harm
by establishing erroneous opinions, is full of mistaken views, and
when he speaks of any facts very oft.en utterly misleads us : an
 XJC

opinion which I do not deliver for the sake of detracting from his
fame ; for it will rather augment it to find that a candid reader must
still admire him, even after he has acquired the strongest conviction
on these points from his own investigations. That we <lo not un·
derstand the ancients, unless we frame distinct notions of such ob­
jects· of their everyday life, as we have in common with them, under
the forms their eyes were accustomed to ; that we should go totally
astray, if (as the middle ages <lid, and, since so many things were
still unchanged, might do without being equally deceived) we too,
on reading of a Roman house, a Roman ship, Roman agriculture
and trade, Roman dress, or the interior of a household in ancient
Rome, conceived the same notions which answered to those words
in our own days,-this everybody must feel: but the paralogisms oc­
casioned by the use of equivocal terms go much further than the out­
ward form of things. The ideas on which the institutions of the
Roman state and its administration were founded, ideas which in
most cases are presupposed in the historical accounts, and are very
rarely, nor ever except in particular instances, explained, were no
less different from ours, than the Roman dwellings, clothing, and
food. And as there is nothing the Asiaticl3 find it harder to con­
ceive than the idea of a republican constitution, as the Hindoos are
utterly unable to look upon the India-Company as an association of
proprietors, or in any other light than as a princess, so it fares with
even the acutest of the moderns in the history of antiquity, unless
by critical and philological studies they have stripped themselves
of their habitual associations. Thus the condition of the Roman
provinces and of their governors was so remote from our usages,
that, although perhaps none but a statesman is capable of interro­
gating history on such matters, and of divining the meaning of
fragments which to the compiler would always be a mystery, yet,
unless he himself makes researches and is qualified for making
them, his notions on these points will either be false or vague and
incoherent. For instance the state of the law concerning landed
property and the public domains at ancient Rome differed to such
a degree in its peculiarities from the rights and institutions we are
used to, that the confounding our ordinary notions of property with
those of the ancients, a confusion from which Montesquieu did not
keep clear any more than Machiavel before him, gives rise to the
 xxi

most grossly erroneous opinions on the most important que.stions of

Roman legislation: opinions under which the voice of justice must
pronounce condemnation against actions and measures perfectly
blameless, or an indistinct feeling of enthusiasm for great and noble
characters must plead in behalf of the most dangerous projects and
undertakings.
When the Greeks had fallen under the dominion of Rome, the
question whether her greatness was a gift of fortune, or had been
achieved by her own efforts, by her virtue as it was termed, employed
the writers who regulated the opinions of readers and of society
in the un warlike anrl idle East. It was an idle question; not started
in the sense in which Mithridates in later times may probably
have meditated on ·it: whether all resistance must be unavailing?
whether an unalterable destiny had decreed that Rome should be
the mistress of the world? or, what was scarcely less fearful, whe­
ther the unmatchable excellence of her national spirit and of her
institutions assured the Roman armies of being victorious for ever?
The question merely busied such as, wishing to get rid of their
shame at the disgraceful manner in which they had sunk into their
present wretchedness, pretended that wan't of energy, of virtue, and
of understanding, ·was a mere secondary consideration in a case
determined by an irresistible fate : at the same time after the man­
ner of slaves, like Xanthias in the comic poet\ they sought their
highest gratification in eavesdropping, in telling tales of their mas­
ters, and in cheating them. Polybius, who had been in earnest,
who was true to his cause, but yielded to the overpowering force
on which the foolish rashness of his countrymen, stirred up as they
bad been by the thoughtless and the profligate, had wrecked, felt
his indignation excited by the chattering of such writers : and one
of the purposes of his history was to make it clear to the Greeks,
that the greatness of Rome was not founded on any fatality, but on
firmness of will, on sage institutions, and unwearied diligence. in
preserving, bettering, and applying them. In so doing however he
did not bestow any praise for actual virtue on the Romans of his
age : and if he now and then expresses himself with an enthusi­
asm that surprises us in a man placed as he was, we must reflect
that his whole character was thoroughly practical, altogether desti­
* Aristophanes Ran. 750 foll.
 xxii

tute of that fervour and that imaginative feeling with which the
Athenians contemplated even what was going on before their eyes,'
but still more what was removed from them a short distance into
the past. . This very deficiency caused those imperfections of his
work, which in the opinion of his countrymen made him only a
secondrate historian. He found everything ripe for destruction in
all the states which were afterward swallowed up in the Roman
empire; and as be was conscious that he himself along with but a
very few kindred souls had vainly resisted the stream, as he felt
bitter scorn for Callicrates, Direus, Critolaus, and the others by
whose various delinquencies the. calamity was brought on, while he
admired Scipio and Cato and Paulus lEmilius, his incorruptible
judgment on some occasions has more than the mere look of want
of feeling. The modems, Machiavel for instance and Montesquieu,
seemed to have revived that question, though in a somewhat differ·
ent sense, and carry their admiration of the Romans and their insti·
tutions to a pitch of the strongest partiality. The austere frugality ·
of the ancient republicans, their carelessness about the possession
and the pleasures of wealth, the strict regard for law among the
people, its universal steadfast loyalty during the happy centuries
when the constitution, after the pretensions of the aristocracy had
been curbed, was.flourishing in its full perfection,-the sound feel·
ing which never amid internal discord allowed of an appeal to
foreign interference,-the absolute empire of the laws and customs,
and the steadiness with which nevertheless whatever in them was
no longer expedient was amended,-the wisdom of the constitution
and of the laws,-the ideal perfection of fortitude realized in the
citizens and in the state,-all these qualities unquestionably excite
a feeling of reverence, which cannot be equally awakened by the
contemplation of any other people. Theirs was no state of unna­
tural constraint, such as under the laws of Sparta, where in the
opinion of other Greeks the contempt of death was natural, because
death burst an intolerable yoke: it was a system on the contrary
which fostered a rich growth of true individual happiness, of manly
enjoyment free from sensuality. Other constitutions, perhaps no
less perfect, produce a less imposing effect upon us from the ho­
nour they pay to wealth: nations of manifold capacities and buoy­
ant spirit cannot escape faults, from which singleness of aim is the
 XXlll

only pres~rvative: and in the events of times past we are more

·sensible of faults than of deficiencies. Thus it is quite natural that,
even setting aside the splendour 'Yherewith power and victories are
always surrounded, we should look up admiringly to the Romans
of the good times of the republic. They bear a great resemblance
in their virtues to the Arabs under the earfy caliphs: but the latter
had no constitution by which to maintain themselves. The Ro­
mans for centuries were compressed into a compact body: the
Arabs were never thus concentrated; they scattered themselves
abroad over half the w~rld, and degenerated rapidly. Yet after all
if we bring those times vividly before our minds, something of hor­
. ror will still mingle with our admiration : for those virtues from
the earliest times were leagued. and compromised with the most
fearful vices; insatiable ambition, unprincipled contempt for the
rights of foreigners, unfeeling indifference for their sufferings,
avarice, even while rapine was yet a stranger to them, and, as a
consequence of the severance of ranks, inhuman hardheartedness
not only towards slaves or foreigners, but even toward fellow-citi­
zens. Those ve~y virtues prepared the way for all these vices to
get ihe mastery, and so were themselves swallowed up.
Now, while in forming a just estimate of the Romans we must
not lose sight of these dark shades in their character, and must
therefore limit our assent to their praises, we are also forced, though
in a different sense from the Greeks, to ascribe a large share in
producing their greatness to fate. Through the whole of their his-.
tory we shall see how often all the virtues of the 'state and of the
people would have been ineffectual, unless destiny had saved Rome
in her perils, and paved the way for her triumphs. The nations
and the men before whom Rome might have fallen appeared too
late: in the periods of her weakness she had only to fight with ad­
versaries no way above her: and while Rome staked everything on
the cast, and war was her natural state, other nations husbanded
their efforts, 'because they despaired of victory, or at the bottom of
their hearts loved nothing but effeminate sloth, whatever their ill­
judged enterprises might seem to imply. No one arriong them all
came against her with a like spirit and a like purpose; and this
alone was enough to make Rome subdue them all. Philip's inac­
tion at the beginning of the·war with Hannibal,-that of Mithri­
 xxiv

dates so loug as the Mar:sian war tlireatcncd Rome, and a slight

additional weight would have turned the scale,-these are events
in which we must recognize the finger of God. For that Rome
was not naturally unconquerable, was demonstrated by the resist­
ance of a few truly warlike nations, who were only overpowered
by superiority of numbers and force. As it was however, .even
these wars served in the intervals between the greater and more
decisive ones to keep discipline and the art of war from declining,
as during a long peaoe they naturally would in the Roman as well
as in other armies.
In the progress of events, when the Roman conquests are con­
solidated into one mass, the history entirely loses the moral and
poetical interest of the earlier centuries : indeed it had already been
disturbed for some time by convulsions and atrocities and the decay
of every national virtue. It seems to be the order of the histoty of
the world, that conquests and divers intermixtures are to fuse the
numberless original races together, and to exterminate such as can­
not be amalgamated: and this the Roman dominion has effected in
a greater extent and degree than any other mighty general revolu­
tion, even than the Arabian. Seldom will a particular people be a
gainer by such an intermixture: some sustain the irreparable loss
of a noble national civilization, science, and literature: and even a
less cultivated people will hardly find that the refinements thus im­
ported, which moreover if they are suited to its genius it might have
attained of itself~ will make amends for the forfeiture of its original
language, and hence of its original character, its national history,
and its hereditary laws. This loss was first felt by the Roman
provinces: but the population of Rome and of Italy being recruited
out of their inhabitants and out of freedmen, Rome suffered in an
equal degree: it became so estranged from its early times and their
history, that even in the third century of our era a humble pane­
gyrist without fear of giving offence could express a doubt whether
his master, whom he compared to the great Scipio, had ever heard
of the second Punic war*: and that Valens could employ Eutropius
in drawing up a meagre outline of Roman history, to supply his
ignorance of it. Nevertheless, though the Roman dominion crushed

* Panegyr. Maxim.i.ani, 8.
 xxv

much, we must gratefully acknowledge what it lias created and pre­

served. It founded or infused life into almost all the towns which
are standing at this day within its ancient limits. The languages
of western Europe, springing from the Latin, kept its literature ac­
cessible, and made its revival possible. Nay it was undoubtedly
the _Roman dominion that preserved Greece and the writings of the
Greeks : for if the East had not been protected by the forces of a
great empire, the barbarians would pi:obably have overrun these de-·
populated and enfeebled countries in very early times, or at all
events infallibly at the period of the great migrations, and then along
with the degenerate Greeks would have swept away the treasures
they were preserving for a reviving world. The Roman law was
a great advantage at least for the Romanized nations; nor will the
Germans ever be able to dispense with it, since they have not matured
that of their own ancestors, and have lost its spirit: and that the
union of the Roman world was necessary to the spreading of reli­
gion, that Rome as its centre enlightened and softened the whole
"\Vest, will scarcely be questioned or denied now by the impartial.
Thus we can look back on this great period of history with the
consoling thought, that the ensuing generations, whose ancestors
had suffered and perished, were the gainers by what was finally
established. It is idle to talk of possible events, which were stifled
in the germ: and so we will not deplore that all ha":e lost many an
unreplaced and irreplaceable treasure: we will not ask whether the
richest crop of good that aftcrages may have reaped can compen­
sate for the sufferings of down-trodden generations. At all events
we do not turn away our eyes from those times with so much of
gloom and doubt, as from the fate of devastated and desolated Asia,
whose fairest regions, abandoned even by the vital powers of
nature, and dying away year ..after year, are shut out from the very
possibility of more prosperous times-where history closes in the
grave.
Of the German nation however, with regard to such of its races
as did not forsake their home, or did not drop their character while
living among the Romanesque nations they had conquered, we may
assert that for the war which they waged during centuries against
Roine, they have in aftertimes been more than rewarded by the
UC'nefit~ accruing from the union of the world under Rome; and that
1.-4
 xxvi

without this an<l the fruits that ripened in it we should hardly have
ceased to be barbarians. It was not by the forms which our ances­
tors at the diffusion of letters imported from thence and from
classical ground, that the noble peculiarities of our national genius,
peculiarities for which nothing can compensate, were smothered;
those forms were not irreconcilable with them: but secondhand
artificial spiritless Frenchified forms and tastes and ideas, such as
even in earlier times had crept in amongst us and overlaid those
which were homesprung, these are the things that for a long time
have made us lukewarm and unnatural. And so, while other
nations look back on the Romans as holding a place among their
progenitors, .we too have no slight personal interest in their story.
 CON TEN TS.

INTRODUCTION 1

.ANCIENT ITALY 5

The Oenotrians and Pelasgians • 20

The Opicans and Ausonians 49

The Aborigines and Latins 60

The Sabines and Sabellians . 69

The Tuscans or Etruscans 82

The Umbrians 108

Iapygia . .. 111

The Greeks in Italy • 118

The Ligurians and Venetians 124

The Three Islands . 129

Conclusion 132

THE PRELIMINARY HISTORY OF ROME.

LEneas and the Trojans in Latium 136

Alba 151

ROME.

Various Traditions concerning the founding of the City 158

Romulus and Numa 167

Beginning and Nature of the earliest History 183

The Era from the Foundation of the City 199

On the Secular Cycle 209

The Beginning of Rome and its Earliest Tribes 218

The Patrician Houses and the Curies 234

The Senate, the Interrexes, and the Kings 258

Tullus Hostilius and Ancus 264

The Lay of L. Tarquinius Priscus and Servius Tullius 272

Examination of the Stories of L. Tarquinius and Servius Tul.

lius 284

The Completeing the City of Rome 297

The Six Equestrian Centuries 304

The Commonalty, and the Plebeian Tribes 309

The Centuries 330

L. Tarquinius the Tyrant, and the Banishment of the Tarquins 372

Commentary on the Story of the last Tarquinius · 389

xxviii CONTENTS.

The Beginning of the Republic, and the Treaty with Carthage 396

The War with Porsenna 412

The Period down to the Death of Tarquinius • 422

The Dictatorship 428

The Cwnmonalty before the Secession, and the Nexi 434

The Secession of the Commonalty, and the Tribunes of the

&~ ~
 THE HISTORY OF ROlVIE.

I HAVE undertaken to write the history of Rome; from the ear·

liest ages of the city, down to the time when the sovereignty of
Augustus over the Roman world was undisputedly acknowledged.
I begin, where the contiguous settlements formed by divers nations
were preparing the growth of a new people : my goal lies, where
this people had incorporated millions with itself, and had given
them its language and its laws; where it ruled from the rising unto
the setting sun, and the last of the ·kingdoms that arose out of Alex­
ander's conquests, was become one of its provinces. Long before
any historical record of particular individuals occurs in those ages, the
forms under which the commonwealth existed, may be recognized
with certainty: so firmly, and for centuries indelibly, were they
impressed upon every thing, and so entirely was the individual iden·
tified with the community. At the clo3e of the period I purpose to
embrace, the nation resolves into a fermenting mass, which, now
that its soul has abandoned it, is daily losing its form and moulder­
ing away.
Numberless are the events and the changes through which the
Romans pa.ssed from one of these limits unto the opposite : vast
destinies, mighty deeds, and men who were worthy to wield a
gigantic power, have preserved the memory of much in the story
of Rome, even during the most ignorant ages. But in the early
part of it poetry has flung her many..coloured veil over historical
truth: afterward a multitude of vain fictions, no less than of popu­
lar leget1ds under a variety of forms, are combined with the outlines
of dry chronicles, and with the scanty results drawn by one or two
genuine historiaus from authentic documents: often they are irre­
concilable and easily discerned; bui at times there is a deceitful
congruity: in no history is it later comparatively before we reach
what is actually certain. Yet this does not make it necessary to
giv~ up as hopeless the most important of all histories for the largest
J,-A
 2 HISTORY OF ROME.

part of its duration. Provided only that no pretension be set up

to such a thorough exactness in minute details, as in truth is of no
value to us, much may be ascertained in those periods, dark as they
are, on historical evidence no weaker than what we possess for
contemporary events in Greece: and this we are bound to attempt.
It is in making out the internal history and condition of the state,
that we may be the most successful ; even more so than in the
same inquiries as to the Greeks. Few nations have, like the Ro­
mans, brought their life to a close, without its being cut short by
the dominion of a stranger: among these few none has lived with
such fulness of strength. No other state has existed so long, pre­
serving all the elements of its being unextingnished: numerous and
manifold from the first, they live on till their natural decease ;
whatever has outlived itself is removed; and something similar is
planted where a place has been left empty, or where new ground
has been enclosed. Thus the state keeps up its youth, and con­
. tinues substantially the same, while evermore renewing itself; until
it comes to a stoppage and a stand-still; and now the indestructible
energy of life is followed first by languor, then by deadly sickness.
Yet during the very ages the story of which we can hardly <lo more
than guess at, there was such a proportion and correspondence
among the various parts of the statP-, that when a few traces and
remains of intelligible import have been brought to light, safe and
.certain conclusions may be drawn from them concerning other
things, from which it is not in ouqiowerto clear away the rubbish,
or of which the lowest foundationytones have been torn up: just
as in mathematics if but a few things are given, we may dispense
with an actual measurement. ·
As rivers are received into the sea, so the ·history of Rome re­
ceives into itself that of all the other nations known to have existed
before her in the regions around the Mediterranean. Many appear
there only to perish forthwith: others maintain their existence for
a while, mostli in a struggle ; but the contact sooner or later proves
fatal to them. A historian of Rome must not leave such as wish
for a representation which shall give meaning to the names of these
nations, and for a view of their condition and character, to seek for
it in other works, where perchance it may not be found: his busi­
ness is to exhibit the best image of them pro<lutible by research
and reflection ; that the reader may not content himself with an
empty name, or with notions caught up at random. ,
Livy had no such aims: what moved him to write, was that
nature. had gifted him ':ith a hJghly brilliant talent for seizing the
 HISTORY OF ROME. 3

characteristic features of humanity, and for narration; with the

imaginative power of a poet, though without the facility of versify­
ing, or the love of it. He wrote, with no feeling of doubt, yet
without conviction, bringing down the marvels of the heroic ages
into the sphere of history;. as was commonly done even by those
who in what belonged to their own times and experience were
any thing but credulous, at a period whe,n the careless belief of
childhood continued undisturbed throughout life. Even those prim­
itive ages when the gods walked among mankind, he would not
absolutely reject: all that was related of the more recent, provided
it was not inconsistent with man's earthly condition, he only held
to be less full and certain, but of the same kind with the records of
accredited history. The constitution he altogether neglected, save
when forced by the internal dissensions to turn his eyes upon it:
and on such occasions his view and judgment were biassed by the
prejudices of the party he had been attached to since the first recol­
lections of his youth, against the men who, from bearing the same
name, were regarded by him as in fact the same, with those he
justly deemed the worst among the conflicting bad in the times of
general corruption. Lastly, though in his later books he gave
descriptions of unknown countries, such as Britain, drawn from
oral accounts, during the remoter ages he took no pains to procure
.any distinct conception of the nations or states he had to speak of.
His wish was, to banish from his thoughts the degeneracy of his
own days, by reviving the recollection of what had been glorious
or excellent in the past; while the ease and security wherein the
weary world was beginning to breathe again, could not but comfort
him in his sadness as he was portraying the fearful events of the
civil wars: he was desirous of teaching his countrymen to know
and admire the deeds of their ancestors, which had been forgotten,
or were heard of only from lisping narratives: and he bestowed on
their literature a colossal masterwork, with which the Greeks have
nothing of the kind to compare; nor can any·modern people place
a similar work beside it. No lo~s that has befallen us in Roman
literature, is compara)Jle to that which has left his history imperfect.
Yet had the whole been preserved, we should still find induce­
ment to frame a Roman history suited to our needs. For in order
that the story of• an age which has wholly passed away, may be to
us like that of the age we live in, in order that the Roman heroes
and patriots may appear before us, not like l\lilton's angels, but as
beings of our flesh and blood, we now require something more and
something else, beside what we read in his inimitable narrative:
4 HISTORY OF ROME.
and who can fail to perceive that in this narrative there is much
which now after eighteen hundred years will not dwell in the
memory of any reader, however interested in the subject? The
devising and fabricating for ourselves the wants of another age,
even though we rank it higher than our own; and the disclaiming
and refusing to satisfy the wants we actually have-such habits
make us helpless and joyless, and are childish. To vie with Livy
as a historian, to fancy that the lost portions of his work might be
replaced, if our materials were only richer, wot;1ld be ridiculous.
But there is no presumption in undertaking carefully and labor­
iously to examine, to combine, and thus to vivify our poor and
fragmentary notices; in order that by such means, during the .pe­
riods where we have nothing better, that image, which readily
arises where the material is plenteous and fine, may still come
forth living and complete in all its essential members.
How far I may ;;;ucceed, is at the disposal of a higher power.
But to these researches I owe the most animated days in the prime
of my life; and since the continuation of this work will fill up my
old age, as Livy's creation did his, it is a pledge that my latter
years will also be fresh and cheerful. He who calls departed ages
back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating: it were
a great thing, if I could scatter the mist that lies upon this most
excellent portion of ancient story, and eould spread a clear light
over it; so that the Romaris shall stand before the eyes of my read­
ers, distinct, intelligible, familiar as contemporaries, with their
institutions and the vicissitudes of their destiny, living and moving.
 ANCIENT ITALY.

TnE Romans are not esteemed to belong to any of the Italian

nations: the writers who talk with credulous simplicity about the
people of Romulus as a colony from Alba, still <lo not on that
account ever reckon them among the Latins ; an<l in the traditions
of the oldest times they appear as equally strangers to all the three
nations in the midst of which their city lay. Hence their history,
if it merely aim at giving an epical tale of actions and events, may
certainly stand alone; and thus almost all the ancients who treated
on it, have severed it from that of the rest of Italy. But to no glory
had the Romans less claim, than to that of the Athenians, of being
an original and peculiar people: if they belonged to no nation, it
was only because, as even their fables and disfigured legends afford
us the means of perceiving, they arose from the coalition of several
that were wholly <listinct from one another 1 • Each of these left
· its peculiar inheritance of language, institutions, and religion, to
the new people; which in the complex of its national character
was assuredly always unlike any of its parent races. The previous
history of those nations would therefore be a fitting preparative for
that of Rome, even if the latter had never extended beyond the
city. But the tribes that peopled Italy were lost in the light of the
city, and the nation formed by its citizens spread itself abroad over
the whole peninsula; the Romans whose story we know from con·

1 This was the ground for the contemptuous assertion made by certain
spiteful Greeks, which Dionysius argues against, that the Romans were no
nation at all, but aconfiuxofoutcasts from all sorts ofpeople, o-6'),,tl\vJ'e,. (I. 89.)
It is the same taunt from which Jo~ephus defends his country against Apion,
who maintained with good reason that much the largest part of the Jews in
Palestine and· Egypt were not sprung from the small colony sent back into
Judea under the Persians, but from individual proselytes. A pion belonged
to a people who had kept themselves unmixed: and from him the contempt
for such as were without ancestry is intelligible; in Greeks it was sheer
malice.
6 HISTORY OF ROl\IE.
temporaries, were de~cended with very few exceptions-among the
masters in oratory or ,poetry there is none but Cresar-from allies
who had been incorporated by the Romans: so that'we cannot
commend the historians of antiquity, for attending only to the
stream tJrnt gave its name to the river, and overlooking all the tribu·
taries, even when they were far mightier. \Ve may and we must
censure those, who, while they recorded tales having merely some
local connexion with Rome, left the story of the fall of the Umbri­
ans, and of the rise and greatness of the Sabellians and Etruscans,
to sink unheeded into' oblivion. Nor would the history of these
nations interest us solely from the importance of the events: Cicero,
himself a Volscian, was aware that his countrymen and the Sabines,
that Samnium and Etruria, had no less reason than Rome to boast
of th~ir wise and great men ; and it can~ot have been by the Pontii
alone that the Samnites were raised to a level with the Romans.
But saving an obscure recollection of them, all the heroes and sages
of the Italians and Tuscans have been forgotten; scarcely has a
dubious name been any where preserved. With regard to the dif·
ference of the races however, their migrations and conquests, no­
tices are to be found scattered over almost the whole field of ancient
literature, as well as on monuments. To collect these, and to
weigh them candidly, and thus in some measure to obtain a substi·
tute for the information we have the misfortune to want, is the
more needful, because these subjects have always been treated arbi­
trarily, injudiciously, nay but too often dishonestly: and these in­
quiries, and such accounts as can be drawn from them, form a
necessary introduetiou to a Roman history by a modern writer.
Cato the censor, the first apparently who wrote the history of
his country in the Latin tongue and in prose, interwove therein, on
the occasions, as it would seem, when the nations and cities of
Italy came forward in Roman story, what he had learnt concerning
the origin and movements of the former, and the foundation of the
latter 2 • To him we are indebted, even where he is not named, for
a considerable part of what has come down to us on these subjects.

2 Hence, with the exception of such as concerned the Ligurians and the
Alpine tribes, these notices found place partly in the first book, which con­
tained the history of the kings, partly in the next two, which related the Ita­
lian wars: This division is evidently the model copied by Appian in arrang­
ing the books of his history, the first three of which embrace the same subjects.
And thus we are to conceive that, if Cato's Orirrins followed the order of
time, it was only by accident: for instance the llly~ian war must have occur­
red in the sixth book, not in the fifth.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 7

The time he lived in was very favourable to his undertaking: ·the

Etruscans, Oscans, and Sabellians were still existing as nations ;
and although to be a Roman citizen was esteemed the highest of all
privileges, yet the dignity of the other states had not yet disappeared,
nor had the recollections of their old times become matter of indif­
ference to the later generation. These nations, as well as Rome,
had their fasti and chronological registers : . mention is made of
their annals 3 : and in places which had not, like Rome, forgotten
their old language, and only preserved fragments from the general
wreck, these may have gone further back than the Roman. Now
if they merely grew up from year to year under the hands of the
magistrates or the priests, they must have been scanty, but, so far
.as they extended, the more authentic. There is however a very
high probability, that among nations like the Oscans, who were
familiar with Greek art, and like the southern Sa_bellians, whose
cultivating Greek philosophy even as authors must assuredly be
something more than· a mere groundless fable 4 , historians both in
Gr~ek and in their native language had arisen, long ere the com­
mencement of a literature at Rome. That literature was in the
prime of its youth before the l\Iarsic war; and yet learning and the
rhetorical arts are said to have been still more flourishing among
the Latins 5 ; a name including .at least all those Italians who had
adopted the use of the IJatin language. The wish of a leading
personage, like Cato, to have books communicated to him, and,
where he needed it, translated, was a command to the subjects of
Rome.
Original documents and inscriptions on brass and stone supplied
still richer and surer materials for history than books : many such
have come down to us in languages that we cannot understand, a
mere dead treasure ; and in those days little of this sort can have
perished, at least in the central parts of Italy, where most of the
towns had suffered but slightly either at the time of their c.:mquest
or during Hannibal's war. At· Athens attention had been turned
toward this source of strict. historical information for a century
3 Prrenestine books, though in the Latin language indeed, are cited by
Solinus p. 9. G.; a history of Cuma, by Festus v. Romam. The Etruscan
annals will be spoken of hereafter.
4 Not that I mean to answer for the individual Pythagoreans said to have
existed among the Lucanians.
5 Cicero de Orat. 111. 11. Nostri minus student literis quam latini. pro
Archia 3. Ferentinatis populus res Grrecas stu<let: says the comic poet
Titinnius in Priscian vu. 12. p. 762.
8 HISTORY OF RO:\m:

and a half before, ever since the Athenian history had reached
its close : but the Romans were blind to their own documents ;
and those of Italy can scarcely be reckoned among Cato's materials.
Sixty years after he wrote, came the Marsic war; and that was
followed by the times of Sylla. Those terrible ravages, which
spreading from place to place visited every region of Italy, and by
which the citizens of the principal towns were entirely swept away,
must also have proved destructive to monuments of every kind,
especially to writings: in many districts the population was changed,
Such was the final vengeance on Samnium ; such the end of the
persevering resistance opposed by Etruria to Sy Ila's tyrannical and
shortsighted resolution to do away with every thing that in the
course of ages had been yielded to circumstances, of her struggle to
maintain the rights she had' been rewarded with for standing aloof
from the cause of Italy. The old Etruscan nation with her science
and her literature ceased to exist: the nobles, who had taken the
lead in the common cause, fell by the sword: military colonies
were established in the large towns, and the Latin language became
the only one prevalent: the greatest part of the nation was stript of
all landed property, and reduced to pine in poverty under foreign
masters, wJrnse oppression deadened every national recollection in
the degraded generation that followed, and left them no other wish
than that of becoming Romans altogether 6• .The Oscan language
indeed had not entirely disappeared at Pompeii and Ilerculanum
when they were destroyed : Gellius seems to mention the Tuscan
as a tongue still living in his days* ; but writings and monuments
in it were as unintelligible as those in Punic or .Iberian, and were
allowed to perish equally unlieeded: as to the theological books,
they could be read in Latin translations. -·
The loss of Varro's writings, who was frequently led to speak
about the ancient times of Italy, and from whom we have many
extracts on these subjects, is not in this respect of any importanGe,
great as the value of his information is for a history of Homan man­
ners. He understood nothing of Tuscan, can hardly have known

6 The intentiQnal extirpation of the higher ~lasses among the Mexicans

the few survivors being either allowed to attach themselves to the conqueror~
or sinking into contempt, led in less than a century to the loss of the science
and learning of this remarkable people; and even of its arts, although they
had been cultivated by the lower orders which suffered less, and not by the
higher castes. Rome did not burn the ancient writings: but she slighted them.
• xr. 7.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 9

much of Oscan; nor does he seem to have made amends for these
deficiencies by applying to others for aid. His statements, so far
as we are acquainted with them, concerning the early history of
Italy, are for the most part utterly worthless, with the exception of
the account enumerating the primitive cities of the people whom he
called the Aborigine~: at times he is evidently following late Greek
writers of no value, and once even a manifest impostor7: it is a pity
that Dionysius and others have been led astray by his authority.
Julius Hyginus, the contemporary and friend of Ovid, wrote on
the origin of the Italian towns, without any critjcal discrimination,
and building on very late Greek authors who were undeserving of
regard. Yet he has been often quoted by the gramma~ians, and
even so early as by Pliny; in whose description of Italy there is
much that has flowed from this turbid source. The same Pliny,
as appears from the list of the works he had made use of, did not
think it worth while to study the Tyrrhenian histories in twenty
books by the emperor Claudius. Universal contempt seems to have
crushed that unfortunate work from its very first appearance, so
that not a line from it has anywhere been quoted: but the I~yons
tables show that Claudius was well acquainted with the Tuscan
annals; and, as we know him to have searched in the Roman ar­
chives8, it may be presumed that with a view of perfecting his
history he would cause similar researches to be made among the
Etruscan monuments. There is no loss more ·to be regretted for
the early history of Rome; and considering the advantages of the
imperial dilettante, we may be sure that neither the Etruscan his­
tory of Flaccus, nor the. work of Ca:!cina0 , although in every other
respect they may have been far better, came near it .in historical
importance.
Cato's knowing nothing of the Oenotrians, is a proof that he had
never read even Timffius, much less Antiochus*. Least of all can
we suppose him to have made use of Aristotle's Polities, which not
only embraced Tarentum and other Greek cities in Italy, but must
also have t:eated of some of the Italian nations; nay, one might

7 Lucius Mallius; for this emendation instead of Mri.µ10, is self-evident:

his Dodomean oracle is such a palpable fraud, that Dionysius, who is usually
so wary, cannot be quit.e honest here. 1. 19.
8 Suetonius Claud. 25. He produces the letter of the Senat.e to Seleucus.
See below, note 923. .
9 Both these works have been introduced to our acquaintance by the Vero­
nese scholia on the lEneid. x. 183. 198
* Di.?nysius 1. 11.

J.-1!

10 HISTORY OF ROME.

suspect, even of Rome itself1°. That this account of the history

and constitution of above a hun<lred and fifty states possessed the
same excellencies which have ma<le Aristotle's writings on natural
history immortal, is clear from the fragments that have been pre•
served, especially those on the Athenian constitution: it may be
inferred too from the critical remarks on various governments which
occur in the Politics. To this master of the learned11 the criminal
laws of Cuma, under the Oscans, and a mythical legend about the
foundation of a city, were no less attractive than speculations about
first causes and final aims, than investigations concerning animal
life or poetry: and this variety of pursuit was the peculiar endow­
ment of his school. ·

IT was not until late that the name of Italy was given to th~
whole region comprised within its natural boundaries, the Alps and
the sea. That name in very early times was a national one in the
south, and was not extended to the more northerly regions until the
Roman sway had united the peninsula into one state, and by colo­
nization and the spreading of the Latin language had moulded its
inhabitants into a single nation. With the exception of a few
islands, no country that was divided amongst a variety of nations,
however clearly its natural boundaries may have been marked out,
bore any general name in the early ages of antiquity, until some
one people became master of it. So it was for instance with Asia
Minor: had it continued one, united state, after Crcesus had subju­
gated all the country to the west of the Halys, the name of Lydia
might have come into use for the whole ; as that of Asia did subse­
quently for the countries which made up the kingdom of Pergamus,
and that of Asians for their inhabitants.
Names of coui1tries were always formed in antiquity, as they
were by the German nations afterward, from the name of the peo­
ple12; and Italian means nothing else than the land of the I tali. Nor
is ·it to be explained, except from that extreme spirit of absurdity
which always came over even the most sagacious of the Greeks and
10 . Plutarch Camill. c. 22. p. 140. a. Qurest. Rom. 6. p. 265. b. Dionysius
r. 72. At all events it is an unpardonable piece of negligence in Pliny, who
ought 'to have been familiar with the whole circle of Aristotle's writings, to
have omitted him in the list of the Greeks that spoke of Rome prior to Theo­
phrastus. m. 9.
11 Il maestro di color che sanno. Dante. See Polit. n. 8.
12 Egypt is perhaps the only exception: but its river, which was so called
by the lonians, furnished an occasion for this, such as did not exiat anywhere
else. .
 lIISTORY OF ROME. 11

Romans the moment they meddled with etymology, how any one
could stumble on the notion of interpreting that name as if it had
belonged originally to the country, because in the Tyrrhenian or
the ancient Greek 18 italos or itulos meant an ox. This was con­
nected by the mythologers with the story of Hercules driving Ger­
yon's herd through the land14 : Timreus, in whose days such things
were no longer thought satisfactory, fouud out an allusion to the
abundance of cattle in Italy' 5 •
· The name of the people was derived by the Greeks from !talus,
a king or lawgiver of the Oenotrians: in the Oscan name of the
country, Vitellium 16, there is an evident reference to Vitellius, the
son of Faunus and ofVitellia, a goddess worshipped in many parts of
ltaly 17• This Vitellius is probably no other than the !talus just
mentioned. If there is any thing to be divined with regard to the
oldest genealogies of those races which were purely Italian, it is
that they were traced up to Faunus ; that of the Oenotrians through
Vitellius, as that of the Latins was through Latinus.
The Italians according to the Greek accounts were the Oenotri­
ans; taken in a more general_ sense, the name assuredly compre­
hended all the tribes that belonged to the same race, the Tyrrhenians,
the Siculians, the Latins. From it came the surname Vitulus, bornt.
by a branch of the Mamilian house, as another bore that of Turinus
or Tyrrhenus : it was a custom, attested by the oldest Roman fasti,
for the great houses to take distinguishing surnames from a people
with whom they were connected by: blood or by the ties of public
hospitality.* All the country at one time inhabited by the same
great people, which at all events occupied the whole of the penin­

13 In the former, according to Apol!odorus Bihl. 11. 5.10.; in the latter,

according to Timreus quoted by Gellius XI. I. Hellanicus of Lesbos, cited by
Dionysius, I. 35, merely says, in the language of the country. Tyrrhenian
however does not here mean Etruscan, but Pelasgic, as in the Tyrrhenian
glosses in Hesychius.
14 Hellanicus and Apollodorus in the passages just referred to.
15 Gellius XI. 1, Piso, quoted by Varro de Re r. u. I, borrowed the expla­
nation from the Greeks.
16 See note 19.
17 Suetonius Vitell. I. This supplied an opportunity for a hieroglyphical
representation: the bull with a human face on the Campanian coins and on
others of southern Italy is Ital us or Vitalus. No doubt too it is the name
Vitalus under various forms, that is expressed by the mysterious Oscan chaxac­
ters on the coins usually ascribed to Pwsturn (Eckhel Doctr. Num. I. p. 159.};
many as are the discrepancies that occur among them: for nothing can be
more flexible than the names of nations in the Italian languages.
* By 1tpo;nict.. See below, note 765,
 12 HISTORY OF ROME.
sula to the south of the Tiber and Cape Garganus, bore the name
of Italia, or Vitalia1 "; and this might still be preserved, after the
ancient races had been destroyed, driven out, or incorporated, by
the Oscans and Sabellians. The Romans and Samnites could never
have borrowed the name of a foreign district, to give it to the land
they inhabited: had it not been in use within the country itself, the
trial of arms, that decided which of the two people was to rule in
the peninsula, would also have determined that it should be called
, Latium or Samnium.
From the name of the country, Italia, the people who settled
therein were ealled ltalicans; and this appellation was extended to
the other branches of the same stock who took no part in the mi­
gration; they were hereby distinguished as well from the foreign­
ers in the north of Italy as from the Romans. As to Italians, no
mention is made -0f such after the downfall of the ancient nation,
until very late times; and then all the inhabitants of the peninsula
are c;i}led so indiscriminately. The ltalicans were for the most
part SabeHians; and that union amongst them which was grounded
on a community of lineage, of language, and of laws, was consum­
mated, with regard to them and such other inhabitants of the south
as were not Greeks, by their civil relation to Rome. That they
looked upon themselves as one ltalican people, is evident from the
Marsic war. Even before, in that of Hannibal, they had acted
separately from the Etruscans and Umbrians, who took no part in
it: now however all the citizens of this Italy were under arms ;
they called the capital of their confederacy Italica ; and its coins
are inscribed with the name Italia or Vitellium 1 9.
The Greeks, who regarded the Oenotrians alone as Italians, were
for a long time strangers to the wider extent in which the name
was applied within the country itself; and this appears from their
usage. In proportion as legends or history represented the territory
of the Oenotrians to have been enlarged or narrowed, did they ·con­
ceive Italia to have increased or diminished. The region which
originally bore the name, was, according to them, the peninsula
bounded by the isthmus of only twenty miles~0 across, between the

18 Vitalia is mentioned by Servi us as one among the various names of the

country: on 1En. vm. 328. ,
19 Micali's explanation of the word Viteliu on the Samnite denary coined
during the Social War (I. p. 52.) may be regarded as established. The an­
alogy of Latium, Samnium, is followed in Italium, Vitalium, Vitellium: whence
Vitellio, like Samnw.
20 160 Stadia, says Strabo v1. p. 255. a. Aristotle calls it half a day's journey.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 13

Scylletic and the Napetine gulf 21 ; where there is a range of low

hills connecting the Apennines with that chain of mountains which,
running off from JEtna, is rent asunder near Hhegium: in other
words it was the southernmost part of what was afterward called
Brutium. Such was the statement of Antiochus of Syracuse, the
son of Xenophanes, who is quoted by Aristotle, though not by
name, where he brings forward the testimony of natives conversant
in traditionary history. This Antiochus was not indeed a very
ancient historian, as he is called by Dionysius 29 , but the contempo­
rary of Herodotus, and probably the younger of the two; for he
closed his Sicilian history with the year 329, 01. 89. 2 23 : he was
the oldest however among the natives of these countries. From
him without doubt did Dionysius also learn that in a wider sense
the country from Tarentum to Posi<lonia, when it belonged to the
Oer:iotrians, was called Italia24 : a fact referred by him to those
private ages in the traditions of which the vicissitudes of nations
are related as the story of princes bearing their name. "\Vith re­
gard to his own days however Antioch us drew a narrower boundary
. for Italia, by a line to M:etapontum from the river Laos, which in
aftertimes sepi:rated Lucania from Brutium 25 : for the Lucanians
had already forced their way in here and made themselves maslers
of the western coast. Tarentum he places beyond the limits of
Italia, in Iapygia: in the same manner Thucydides, who wrote
about the year 350, makes. a distinction between Iapygia and
Italia 20 • Hence the Tarentines have no share in the name of Ita­
liots27: yet that name certainly reached to Posidonia, and did not

21 Aristotle Polit. VII. 10. Dionysius 1. 35. Strabo v1. p. 254. d. •

22 :l:U)''}'P"<!>'O' 'lfa:ru tip)C<t.io,. I. 12.
23 Diodor. xu. 7i.
24 · 1. 73. ..Hr J'~ 'l"OT• 'IT<t.1'.l<t,; ,;,,.;; Telp«v~•' "XP' rr~.-111..,,;... , .,,.... p;.M.,.
25 Strabo v1. p. 254. d. •op1ov J'' ,,;,.,.;;, .;.,,.•<1><1.lw '7rpiic µb .,.'! Tupph""'!
'1/'tA~f'" trOv .Aeior ?rOT«µ6v• 11'p0, Jf rr~ ~1xo1.1a~ "t0 M1Tct?r6v'T'101· ''TH,. J~ 'I't.t.­
p<tr'l"lrhr iJLTO' Tli, 'IT<t.1'.l<tc oroµi.!;11, 'Id'?rU)'d.C "";\°"'' Hence Posidonia and
Elea were then beyond the borders of Italy. But as Lucania was not yet be­
come a usual name, the only way of describing these places was, as situate in
Oenotria: and this is the way Herodotus talks ofElea: 1.167.
26 'VII. 33. Of the great armament under Demosthenes and Eurymedon,
he says lf.<1.'l"l.-x_ouo-11 ;, T<t.' Xo1pC:.J<1., vil.-ou' 'l<t.'?ru)'["'• 1t<1.l-(i1tei80)-.i<1>11troiiv•
.,...., " M•Td.'7r0V'TIOP 'l"ff' 'IT<t.1'.i<t.,,
27 The seventh Platonic epistle, which unquestionably is of a•better cast
than almost all the others, speaks of Tarentum as in Italy: this is one of the
historical proofs from which I pronounce it without hesitation to be spurious.
The passage is p. 339. d. 'I""'' '" "X11tt;>,.[<1., 'l"t ""' 'IT<t.1'.l<t., i1'.1torT"OtJr-µI. The
former are Dionysius and Archedemus; the latter Archytas ""' oi iv Tip"-VTI.
14 HISTORY OF ROME.

stop with Velia. No Greek however before the time of the Mace­
donian dynasty would call the Cha!cidian colony of Cuma a town
of Italy, but of Opica 29 : as J,atium is called a district of Opica by
Aristotle 29 • · • •

Still narrower were the limits assigned to Italy in the Tripto­

lemus of Sophocles, in which it was confined to the eastern coast:
unfortunately Dionysius has contented himself with quoting but
three lines from that play 30 • According to the custom of the Greek
tragedians, to bring in the gods instructing those who were doomed
to distant wanderings, with regard to their way, the hero of Eleusis
was directed by Ceres, how, following the seashore, he should con­
vey his blessings into the regions of the west; passing from the
promontory of lapygia, along the coast of Italy, then making the
round of Sicily, then returning to the continent and proceeding
through Oenotria, along the Tyrrhenian gulf, toward Ligystica.
The same eastern coast was the Italy "rich in white grain," cele­
brated by Sophocles in that plays 1 ; in which was the Siritis so re­
nowned among the Greeks, and the plains of Metapontum: it is
clear that the poet's praise cannot refer to the rich land of Cam·­
pania, as Pliny took it to do. A late writer, who, ignorant as to
the actual state of the world, compiled a treatise on chorography,
the most variable of all sciences, out of antiquated books 39,-whom
however we are glad to have, from his standing in their place,­
concurs with Sophocles in calling the whole coast from the Faro to
Posidonia by the name of Oenotria38,
The ancient usage was still kept up long aftenrnrd, at least by
the writers at Athens. In the fragment of an account of the way
of boxing the compass, as we should call it, attributed to Aristotle,
it is said that the Thrakias in Italy and Sicily, is called Circas,
because it blows from the headland of Circeii" 4 • The local names
which are there adduced for the same wind, from Thrace, Lesbos,
and l\fegara, show that it must have been a northwestern: and,
looking from Calabria an<l Sicily, the bearing of Circeii may be
regarded as pretty nearly the same. Now this fragment, it is true,
has no right to Aristotle's name; for it contains passages that are
.at variance with works of unquestionable genuineness85 : still it is

28 Thucyd. VI. 4. 29 Referred to by Dionysius 1. 72.

30 Dionysius 1. 12. 31 Pliny xvm. 12. 1.
32 As Raphael Volaterranus did from Pliny and Mela.
33 Scymnus: compare v. 243. ff. with 299. ff.
U Opusc. min. p. 133. Sylb. 35 The Meteorologies 11. 6.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 15

certainly not older than his time 36 : perhaps, as at least one other
book that has found a place among his writings" 7, it was by Theo­
phrastus. The latter continues to make a distinction between
Latium and Italia38 in his History of I'lants, in a passage which
seems to have been written no long time after the death of Cassan­
der in 01. 120. 3. 455 39 ,
About the same time however king Demetrius wrote to the Ro­
mans, that it did not become the people who ruled over Italy, to
send out pirates• 0 : and yet the country called Italia in the time of
Antiochus was still wholly independent of th~m ••That the Taren­
tines invited Pyrrhus expressly into Italy, as Pausanias says they
did 4 ', is a point whereon the words used by so late a writer, who
assuredly did not weigh their import, cannot be regarded as decisive:
yet it is hardly to be doubted. For nearly all Italy, in the extent
assigned to it by the Latin usage of those times, was already united
under the Romans; and the weaker the Greeks in the cities that
yet remained felt themselves as compared with the Italicans, the
36 Aristotle died in the year 430.
37 The Eeonomics, the first book as it is called: this is now established
from Philodemus.
38 Hist. Pl. v. 9. '1"t»V ir '1"~ Att.'1"lv~ &«>.1»1 >"aµlvt»v ri7rtp~•>.~, ""-j '?""''
iAetTlvm1 "~' 'tl»V 'Jl"IUX.iVr.tJY, µ•'~°' T«.V°T«. &r.tl Jl.d.f...h[DI 'Z"ll>V 'I'l"«.A.IX4H', oUJ'h ";'d.P

(f. t' «f"-) '''"',,.po> '1"« '1 '1"~ Kupv<f. · ·

39 In the chapter just cited Theophrastus speaks of the undecireme built
by king Demetrius of Cyprian timber. That island was lost before the year
458. Pliny places the composition of the whole work about the year 440;
being misled by finding the mention of an archon by .whom he supposed this
year was designated. He overlooked the occurrence of several others and
later ones: these chronological notices do indeed show the length of time
during which the philosopher continued to incorporate such additions as sug­
gested themselves with his work, which had been composed, though not yet
made public: but even the .latest of them cannot be regarded as determining
the year of the publication. In the year 117.2, he wishe.d to state that Cyrene
had then existed for about 300 years; so he named the archon of the day
(vr. 3). Thus he was told of natural phenomena, that they had occurred a
certain number of years before: all these dates might have been accommodated
to the year of the publication; but it was quite superfluous. A multitude of
other additions must have been made. in the same way, which we are unable.
to detect: they were not appended externally, but immediately wrought into
the work itself. In like manner Aristotle has evidently enlarged. his Rhe~oric,
which in its first sketch was one of his earlier works, with additions till toward
the close of his life. Such books, which were kept to be continually worked
at, and were rommunicated to none but disciples, I hold to be those which
were ~alled esoteric: the letter attributed to Alexauder, which perhaps may
be genuine, agrees l'ery well with this view.

40 Strabo v. p. 232. b. :l:'1"ptt.'1"Hrtiv 'l'a; 'l-r«Xi"'·

41 Attic. c. 12.

16 HISTORY OF ROME.

surer were they to follow them in giving a name to the country. , In

this manner that usage was also introduced into Greek books, at
least from the time of the expedition of Pyrrhus.
That the collection of marvellous stories which occurs among
the writings of Aristotle, cannot be his work, is demonstrated,
should there be any to whom the language and spirit of that book
do not speak intelligibly enough, at all events by the mention of
Cleonymus and Agathocles: yet it must have been composed before
the end of the first Punic war; for it talks of the Carthaginian pro­
vince in Sicily.· l\Iany of these stories, especially such as relate
to the west of Europe, are manifestly borrowed from 'fimreus,
whose history was full of wonderful tales: now Timreus wrote
about or after the year 490; and the other work may for the pur­
poses of the present inquiry be considered as of the same age. fo
this however Italy bas a far wider extent: the Sirenusre, Cuma,
and Circeii are expressly said to belong to it; Tyrrhenia on the
contrary and the land of the Ombricans are mentioned separately:
so that the boundaries of Italy seem at that time, though there was
not indeed any precise line of demarcation, to have stretched to the
Tiber and beyond Picenum 42 : a country large enough to be called
the broad Italy, in the epigram of Alcreus the Messenian on the
victory of Flamininus in 557. IIalf a century however before the
l\Iarsic war, about 615, the name of Italy was used by Polybius in
the widest extent, as reaching to the Alps; comprising Cisalpin~
Gaul and Venetia; only perhaps to the exclusion of the Italian half
of Ligurijl. That M. Cato in his Origins reckoned Etruria and
Umbria parts ofltaly, seems certain: his treating in the same work
concerning the descent of the Ligurians, the Euganeans, and the
Alpine tribes, is no proof that he included them within its limits:
for why should he lay down a iaw for himself, never to make in­
quiries touching the descent of a nation beyond the borders of Italy?
or, if he learnt anything about such a one, to give it no room in his'
work?
In the latter days of the Roman empire, when Maximian had
transferred the imperial residence to Milan, the name of Italy in the
official language was again confined to a narrower.compass; in the
north, as the extreme south was where it was said to have originated.

42 This is the view taken by Clemens of Alexandria, when he calls the

Tuscans l'l'etll.i«~ ;ti'l'oY<~: Strom. I. p. 306. Timreushimselftoowould scarcely
have given an etymology for the name of Italy in the history of Pyrrhus, un­
less it had already become generally prevalent for 11. considerable range of
country.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 17

Italy, properly so called in that age, comprised the five annonary

provinces, JEmilia, Liguria, Flaminia, Venetia, and Istria48 : from
this usage did the kingdom of the Lombards receive its name: and
as its limits, if they <lid not include !stria, stretched a great deal
further southward, there was nothing of arrogant assumption in the
title.
Dionysius says, before the time of Hercules the whole peninsula
was by the Greeks called Hesperia or Ausonia, but by the natives
Saturnia44 , I will not seriously censure the folly of attempting to
make out upon historical grounds what is earlier or what later in a
mythical age: nevertheless there was more of consistency in the
captiousne,ss of the Alexandrian critics who found fault with Apol·
lonius for speaking of Ausonia during the Argonautic expedition,
whereas that name was derived from a son of Ulysses and Calypso 45 •
Hesperia, being a name that had an air of antiquity, is frequently
used by Roman poets after Greek models who have been lost: in
the Greek writers that remain it is extremely rare: and in the more
ancient never._be!\rs a particular reference to Italy! From the in·
scriptions on the Iliac table, it seems probable that Stesichorus in
his 'H.tou nfp.-1r represented JEneas as setting forth for Hesperia46 :
Agathyllus, as quoted by Dionysius, says .!Eneas lwstened to Hes­
peria47: Apollonius mentions the conveyance of Circe by the god
of the sun to the Tyrsenian coast in the Hesperian country48 • This
name however embraced the whole ·west, as Hesperia ll:fagna, like
a fourth quarter of the world, to which Iberia belonged quite as much
as italy: thus we comprise the' Levant and Anatolia as parts in the
East. But as what the poets had to tell of Hesperia almost always
related to Italy, hardly ever to Iberia, this gave rise to the notion,
and to the subsequent usage, which identified -Hesperia with Italy.
Ausonia was a name extended by the Greeks, as was the case
43 Jae. Gothofredus ad]. 6. C. Th. XI. 1. de annona et tributis.

44 [. 35.

45 ,Schol. Apo]. iv. 553. This was the derivation commonly received: the .

poet however might have come off; for there was another whieh went back

to Aii?ilr, a name given to the country by the barbarians. See the Etym.

Magn. v. Au.-om. ·

46 •Amfctr (thus) a.7rctlpr.1 1ir 'T~r I'E.-?rtpl11.r. Tychsen Comm. de Q.

Smyrnmo m. §. 11. p. 74.

47 'Au'T~r ,f 'E.-?rtplhr i.-u'To ;t961.:t. r. 49. This Agathyllus seems to have

belonged to the Alexandrian age. As to the line of Ennius-Est. locus,
Hesperiam quam mortales perhibebant (read perhibebunt)-it is quite as likely
to be taken from some Greek just before his time, as from a poet of a better
age. In the Anthology we find Hesperia for Italia, but not before Agathias.
48 Argon. m. 311. 312. ·

1.-c

18 HISTORY OF ROME.

with Italia, from a single district to the country beyond it. At first
it was synonymous with Opica: and since the name ofOpicans was
given by the Greeks, as early as about the end of the fourth century
of the city, to all the tribes dwelling within the Italy of Timreus,
as above described, they began in their poetical language to apply
the name Ausoni:i no less wi<lely 49 • This must have been <lone by
writers now lost, and long before the time of Lycophron, by whom,
after the year 560, the whole of the peninsula to the south of
Tyrrhenia and Ombrica is called Ausonia50 • With others this is an
appellation for the region between the Apennines and the lower
sea 51 : and in this latter enlarged sense the word is evidently used by
Apollonius (under Ptolemy Euergetes, between 505 and 531) for
the whole coast of Italy on the lower sea, even for that of EtruriaM.
Saturnia, a name said by Dionysius to. have been found in the
Sibylline oracies-of which however he can only have been ac­
quainted with the latter and forg13d collection-may perhaps have
been used by the ancient Latins to designate a part of central
Italy, wherein Latium was contained; but to what extent we cannot
define: hence the Saturnian verses, w hi eh were sung in a measure
peculiar to these nations. Th!'l traces of this name however ai:e so·
faint, that all we can say with confidence is, it certainly never came
into general use for the whole of the peninsula.·
Italia and Oenotria, Ausonia or Opica53 , Tyrrhenia, lapygia, and
Ombrica, are appellations derived from the Greek names of the
tribes that inhabited the regions called after them on the coast of the
49 In this sense Circe's island, JErea, is accounted in Ausonia: Apollodorus
1. 9. 24. And the oracle said to have been delivered to the Chalcidians, calls
the neighbourhood of Rhegium AiJrrov11. x..Jp11.v :-Diodorus in the Eclog. de
sententiis p. 11. ed. Maii-which is itself a proof how recent the forgery must
have been.
50 The Sicilian strait v. 44; Arpi and Apulia vv. 5!J2. 615; Opica, properly
so ealled, and the Apennines v. 702; Oenotria vv. 92'2.1047. That Lycophron
separated Tyrrhenia and Ombrica from Ausonia, is shown by vv. 1239. 1360.
It is true he calls Agylla. Ausonian; but this is before the Tyrrhenians took
possession of it: v.1355. As a general name for Italy, Ausonia is used by
Dionysius Periegetes, and frequently in the Anthology, but by no poet older
than Antipater of Thessalonica. In the worthless Orphic Argonautics the
.li.usonian islands must mean even Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica: v. 1255. In
the fifth and sixth centuries, to one of which that poem bel~ngs, such as
wished to write with elegance, sometimes called the Italians of their age Au­
sonians even in prose; and in Priscus (Excerpt. de Legat. p. 59. B.) Ausonian
seems to be equivalent to Volgare, as distinguished from Latin.
51 Fest. Epit. v. Ausonla.m.

52 Argon IV. 553.

53 Also Opir:ia: Thucydides vr. 4.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 19

peninsula, during the age when Magna Grrecia was most flourish­
ing: and such was the number of the countries placed by their
chorographers to the south of the Po and to the east of the Macra.
The main part of what we know concerning Italy before the. time
of the Romans, has been handed down to us by the Greeks ; and
their divisions and views form the fittest guide for an inquiry which
undertakes to collect and throw light on .our information with re­
gard to the various tribes of its inhabitants. At the time however
that the Greek settlements grew up, neither the Etruscans nor the
Sabcllians had made their appearance within the sphere of their
knowledge: hence that ancient distribution of the country makes
no mention of them; nor has it any room for the powerful states
which the latter established in the land of the ancient Italians and
Opicans, under the name of Samnites, Lucanians and Campanians.
In the archeological account of the Italian nations, on which I am
now about ~o enter, they as well as the Etruscans will take the place
that belongs to them.
 THE OENOTRIANS AND PEL~SGIANS.

WITH regard to the origin of the Oenotrians Pherecydes wrote 54 :

that Oenotrus was one of the twenty sons of Lycaon, and that the
Oenotrians were named after him, as the Peucetians on the Ionian
gulf were after his brother Peucetius. They migrated from Ar-.
cadia55, seventeen generations before the Trojan war, with a multi­
tude of Arcadians and other Greeks, who were pressed for room at
home: and this, says Pausaniass 6 , is the earliest colony, whether
of Greeks or barbarians, whereof a recollection has been preserved.
Other genealogers have stated the number of the Lycaonids dif­
ferently: the names found in Pausanias amount to six and twenty,
and several have probably dropt out of his text. Apollodoruss7
reckons them at fifty, of which number his list falls short by one.
Very few in the two lists are the same : Pausanias has no Peuce­
tius, Apollodorus neither him nor Oenotrus: but the strangest thing
is, that, though their names mark them all out as founders of races
or of cities, still the latter mythol~ger makes them all perish in
Deucalion's flood. It is clear that he, or the author he followed,
must have absurdly mixed up a legend about certain impious sons
of Lycaon, who perhaps were nameless, with the tradition which
enumerated the towns of Arcadia and such as were of kindred
origin, under the names of their pretended founders.
Legends of this sort will not be looked upon by any as historical:
but in the light of national pedigrees, like the Mosaical, such
genealogies are deserving of attention; inasmuch as they present
views concerning the affinity of nations, which certainly were not
inventions of the genealogers, themselves early writers after the
scale of our literature, but were taken by them from poems of the
same class with the Theogony, or from ancient treatises, or prevalent
opinions. That portions indeed of these genealogies are grounded
54 Quoted by Dionysius 1. 13. Compare 1. 11.

55 Dionysius 1. 11. 56 Arcad. c. 3. 57 Biblioth. m. 8. 1.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 21

on very erroneous suppositions, or at least on accounts which in

parts have been misunderstood, is exemplified in the Mosaical:
· wherein races, which undeniably belong to entirely different fami·
lies, are represented as connected: and I am very willing to allow
that those of the Greek mythologers may contain still greater
errors. But if, we ,find them mentioning the Pelasgian nation,
they at all events belong to an age when that name and people had
nothing of the mystery which they bore in the eyes of the later
Greeks; for instance of Strabo: and even. though the Arcadians
had been transformed into Hellens, still a very distinct recollection
might be retained of their affinity with the Thesprotians, whose
land contained the oracle of Dodona, as well as of that between
these Epirots and other races; which is implied in the common
descent of lVIrenalus and the other Arcadians "and of Thesprotus and
Oenotrus from Pelasgus. Nor does this genealogy stand alone in
calling the Oenotrians Pelasgians ; evidence tQ the same effect,
perfectly unexceptionable, and as strictly historical as the case will
admit of, is furnished by the fact, that the serfs of the Italian
Greeks, who must undoubtedly have been Oenotrians, were called
Pelasgians58 • Moreover we have statements of less authenticity,
but of very various kinds, which exhibit the Pelasgians in many
different quarters of Italy. ·'
The name of this people, of whom the historical inquirers in the
age of Augustus could find no trace among any then subsisting, and
about whom so many opinions have been maintained with such
confidence of late, is irksome to the historian, hating as he does
that spurious philology which raises pretensions to knowledge
concerning races so completely buried in silence, and is revolting
on account of the scandalous abuse that has been made of imagi~
nary Pelasgic mysteries and lore. This disgust has hitherto kepi
me from speaking of the Pelasgians in general; especially as by
doing so I might only be opening a way for a new influx of writings
on this unfortunate subject. I was desirous of confining myself to
such tribes of this nation as are mentioned among the inhabitants of
Italy; but this would leave the investigation wholly unsatisfactory:
and the one I am now about to commence does not pretend to make
out any thing else than Strabo for instance, if he had set what he
knew distinctly before his own mind, might have given as the
result. . . . /
The Pelasgians were a different nation from the Hellens 5 9: thei:r-·
58 Stephanus Byz. v. xioc.

59 They are thus di.lltinguished by Herodotus,

22 HISTORY OF ROME.
language was peculiar and not Greek60 : this assertion however
must not be stretched to imply a difference like that between the
Greek and the lllyrian or· Thracian. Nations whose languages
were more nearly akin than the Latin and Greek, would still speak
so as not to be mutually understood; and this is what Herodotus
has in his eye: who, distinctly as he draws a line between the two
nations, yet deviates from all other Greek writers in ranking the
Epirots among the Hellens 61 • That there was an essential affinity,
notwithstanding the difference, is probable, from the ease with
which so many of the Pelasgian nations ripened into Hellens; as
well as from the Latin language containing an element which is
half Greek, and the Pelasgic origin of which seems unqurstionable.
Herodotus sayoi, that in proce~s of time they grew to be accounted
Greeks 62 • From the Pelasgians was the Greek. theology derived 63 ;
and the oracle of Dodona belonged to them. Their name was
most probably a national one 64 ; at least the Greek explanations of
it are absurd.
As there are creatures, of races which seem to have survived
from a period of other forms, standing like aliens left to pine away
in an altered world, so the Pelasgians, in the portion of history
within the reach of our monuments and legends, appear only in a.
state of ruin and decay: and it is this that makes them so mysteri­
ous. The old traditions spoke of them as a race. pursued by the
heavenly powers with never-ending calamities 65 ; and the traces of
their abode in very widely di&tant regions gave rise to the fancy;
that they had roamed about from land to land in the hope of escap­
ing from the~e afflictions. And whereas the best acquisition of na­
tions as well as individuals is the recollection they leave, surely no
people has been so hardly dealt with in this respect as the Pelas­
gians. Even Ephorus, early as he lived, seems to have refused
them the character of a nation, and to have imagined that the name
was one assumed. by a band. of marauders, who issued from Arcadia
and received accession.o from a variety of tribes: whereas he
()0 Herod. 1. 57. The Tyrrhenian and Siculian words found in the glossa­
ries are Pelasgic: but how few of them have escaped being corrupted by the
transcribers! The pame Larissa, borne by two ancient capitals of the nation,
in Thessaly and Asia, by the citadel of Argos, a town near the Liris (Dionys.
1. 21.), and many other places, may be regarded as a. Pelasgic word. .
61 He speaks of Thresprotia as in Hellas, II. 56: and classes the Mo!ossians,
among the Hel!ens, vi. 127.

62 n. 51. 081v 7rSf 1<ct.l "E>.Anm ilp~cwro voµ1<r8'iivct.1.

63 Herod. 11. 51. 64 See notes 58 and 96.

65 Dionysius 1. 17. ixpi!O"ct.'1'o TUX.ct." Ju0"7ro'1'µ0H.

 HISTORY OF RO;\'fE. 23

that views the fable of their wanderings iu a different light, and

searches for traces of their diffusion, will on the contrary recognize
that they are one of the very greatest nations of ancient Europe;
who in the course of their migrationi; spread almost as, w_itlely as
the Celts.
It is not an arbitrary fiction of the poet, when JEschylus makes
king Pelasgus, the son of Pal~clithon, boast, that he antl his people
are masters of the whole country to the west of the Strymon 66 •
At the time when the Cariaus were still inhabiting the Cyclades,
and were even settled with other barbarous nations in several quar­
ters on the continent of Bellas, while the Ilellen':l were confined to
the northern mountains; the Peloponncsus and the largest part of
Hellas belonged to the Pelasgians 67: but this was a very small por­
tion of the countries they occupied. It may here be remarked,_
that the way in which the Hellens spread, is lil~e that in which the
Romans and Latins spread in Italy: a detachment of them settled
amid a far more numerous ,community of a different, though not
wholly foreign, nature; and this community adopted the language
and laws of the colonists, in order to resemble them. For this is
the only meaning we can attach to the account vf Thucydides, how
Hellen and his family were called in and received 68 : the invaders
who gave a Dorian character to the inhabitants of the three districts
in the Peloponnesus, were much inferior to the old population in
number. •
The Arcadians, the most ancient settlers at Argos, the Ionians,
were all Pelasgian races; and these it is probable originally formed
the only inhabitants of the Peloponnesus. The people of Attica
too are termed Pelasgian Cranai, even before the Ionian immigra­
tion: whereas the Bceotians and Locrians were not accounted Pelas·
gians. Thessaly was their second great seat in Hellas, or, as it
was then generally called, in Argos.· Hence Thessaly was termed
the Pelasgian Argos*, and a part of it retained the name of Pelas­
giotis: the hypothesis which supposes the Pelasgians in the middle
of Italy to have migra1ed thither from the East, brings them from
Thessaly, as if this were their proper home; and the words Thes­

66 Suppl. v. 248. That is, of Oldland.

67 na""""i'"'' ixov<Ta:r ,,.,,, vuv ·EH<iJ'<t. """'o,uhHr : Herod. vm. 44: which
says still more; and too much, since it excludes the Leleges, Caucones, an<l
others. Hellas was of old called PPla.sgia, says the ~ame author, n. 56. The
converse will not hold. · ­
68 1. 8. * Homer II. 11 €81.
24 HISTORY OF ROME.

salian and Pelasgian are used as equivalent69 • No change was

made in this by the migration of the Thessalians properly so called
fr'.)m Thesprotia into Aemonia·1': for the Thesprotians were Pelas­
gians: their progenitor is mentioned in Apollodorus among the
Lycaonids; according to others Pelasgus after the deluge came into
Epirus, and appointed one of his followers king of the Molossians
and Thesprotians7°: the Epirot tribes, says Strabo, are by many
called Pelasgians71: and Dodona is acknow !edged on all sides to
have been Pelasgian ground. The Epirots are distinguished in the
most positive manner by Thucydides and other writers from the
Greeks, and are expressly termed barbarians: nor is this to be
counterbalanced by the indulgence of Polybius in classing them
among the Hellens: although it is true we have here another in­
stance of the ease with which a Pelasgian people was transformed
into Greeks. To the Epirots there also belonged a variety of races
on tile northern skirts of the mountains which afterward composed
Upper Macedonia, the Orestians, the Pelagonians, the Elimiots7 9 :
as well as those on the opposite border who were subs.equently
inco'rporated as barbarian tribes with .lEtolia when it was enlarged,
the Amphilochians, Agrmans, and others. The land near the
mouth of the Achelous, which flows through the territories or along
the borders of the last-mentioned tribes, was occupied in the my­
thycal age by the Teleboans, who are named after one of the
Lycaonids, and must be considered as Pelasgians. So must the
Dolopians, among whose mountains that river takes its rise: for
the Pelasgians who dwelt in Scyrus and Sciathus, are in the former
of these islands called Dolopians 73 • The tribes on th!) Achelous
were indeed ,members of the Amphictyonic league; but this is no
proof of their Hellenic origin: for the Thessalians were among the
leading Amphictyons; and the main tie in that association was re­
ligion, in which the Pelasgians and Hellens agreed74,

69 Strabo v. p. 220. d. '!""''

0•'T'T«M•' 'Tl~: he is speaking of the Pelas­
gians at Crere.. Cyzicus was said to have been inhabited in early times by
Thessalians, Pelasgians, and Tyrrhenians: instead of its being seen that these
were different names of the same nation, a story was fabricated, how the
Pelasgians were expelled by the Thessalians, and these by the Tyrrhenians.
Conon 41: compared with the Scholiast on Apollonius 1. 987 and 948. See
notes 114 and 255.
* Herod. vu. 176. 70 Plutarch Pyrrh. 1.
71. v. p. 221. b. 72 Strabo 1x. p. 434. d.
73 Scymnus. v. 582. Dicrearchus, p.. 26. rr.,,..,.,,;.. 'J:itupo,, Plutarch
Cim. c. 8.
74 Hence even Plato allows his Greek state to adopt religious rites from
 HISTORY OF ROME. 25

On the north the boundary assigned by .tEschylus to the land of

the Pelasgians is the Strymon and the Algos; a description which
in him must be taken as geographically correct, whether the river
he calls the Algos be one in lllyria or in Macedonia: and thus
Macedonia is included by the poet in Pelasgia. When Macedonia
had become a great kingdom, the main part of the Macedonian peo­
ple was made up of Greeks, lllyrians, Pceonians, and Thracians;
but the core of the nation was still a peculiar race, which can
neither be considered as Greek nor as Illyrian. I hold that this too
'Yas Pelasgian, on the authority of .tEschylus, and on a variety of
grounds. Among the l,ycaonids there is a l\Iacednus: in a legendary
history, which was probably derived from Thcopompus, the sub­
jects of the first king are called Pelasgians 75 : and the Elimiots, who
according to Strabo were an Epirot, that is, a Pelasgian race, were
among the genuine l\1acedonians1s.
A people of whose descent we have no credible account, the
Bottireans, were dwelling intermixed with the Chalcidians at the
beginning of the Peloponnesian war: it is clear that they were not
Greeks ; nor were they barbarians altogether alien to them, like the
neighbouring Thracians. If such a character of itself induces us
to suppose that they must have been Pelasgians, this presumption
is heightened by our finding that llottia was the seat of the. most
ancient Macedonian Pelasgians77.
With regard to the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians on mount Athos, it
may be true that tliey were merely fugitives from Lemnos*: but
Lemnos, lmbrus, and Samothrace, were celebrated as the abodes of
the Pela~gians, and such they continued down to the historical
period78 : the account that the Pelasgians had migrated thither from
Athens, does not rest.on suflicicntly valid auth.ority: or, s~pposing
we ought not to reject it, still it was probably a kindred race that
receiv~d them; for these regions were overrun by Pelasgian tribes.

the Tyrrhenians: (de Legib. v. p. 733, c.): not from the Etruscans, but such
as proceeded from Samothra~e.
75 Justin vn._ 1. 76 Thucydides II. 99.
77 In the passage of Justin before cited (vu. 1.) I read regio Bottia, in­
stead of Bccotia: no various readings are mentioned: Pmonia is an unwarrant­
able change. Bottia is the name of the country on the Axius.-This conjec­
ture is now fully confirmed by the Eclogm from Diodorus under the head De
Scntentiis where (p. 4.) the orade comman<ls Perdiccas, All.A.' ra· E:>TU)'Of<EVD'
Bou't~i'J'ot (read Bo'l'.,.,;;·J'ot) :>rpo, :>roll.rif<nll.Dv• .
* Thucyd. IV. IOD.
78 As to Lemnos and lmbrus no references are needed: of Samothracr this
is said by Herodotus, Ir. 51.
I.-D
26 HISTORY OF ROME.

They were the inhabit~nts of Lesbos and Chios, before the Greeks
took possession of them7 9 ; and according to l\Ienecrates the El:Pan,
of the whole coast of Ionia beginning from l\fycale" 0 , and of lEolis:
in Caria of Tralles 81: on the Hellespont two of their towns were
still extant in the days of Herodotus 82 : Cyzicus was theirs, until
the Milesians made themselves masters of it83 : and the Macrians, a
race of their stock, dwelt on the other side of the same island on the
coast facing the Bosphorus 84 ; No point in the history of the diffo­
sion ·of nations is to be maJe out with greater historical certainty,
than appertains to the statements whence this summary has been
drawn. I will therefore keep it apart from the opinion, which I
state merely as a conjecture, that the Teucrians and Dardanians,
Troy and Hector, ought perhaps to be considered as belonging to
the Pelasgian race. The seat of these tribes lay between the Pe·
lasgian settlements on the Hellespont and in lEolis: that they were
not Phrygians was very clearly perceived by the Greek philologers,
who had even a suspicion that they were not barbarians at all.
According to the earliest Gree!: account, Dardanus had come from
the Pelasgian country, Arcadia, and from Samothrace, the Pelas­
gian island: according to that which was adopted by Virgil-for he
certainly did not invent it-from the Tyrrhenian city of Corythus,
the capital of those Tyrrhenian Pelasgians whose wanderings came
to a close in the islands on the coast of Samothrace85 •
The progress of my investigation will lead me back again Into
these regions: for the present I shape my course with lEneas
through the lEgean sea to\,\'ard Hesperia. The Macrians on thfl
Hellespont were held to have come from Eubrea, which was called
l\'.Iacris" 6 : and in the same island, as in Thessaly, we find the Hes­
ti:£ans*. Even among the Cyclades, the rest of which, with the
exception of some scattered Phenician settlements, were peopled
79 Strabo v. p. 2'2L h. XIII. p. 621. b. 80 Strabo XIII. p. 621, b.
81 Agathias n. p. 54. a. d. ed. Par. He must have learnt this from the
chronicle he quotes with regard to the restoration of the town after the earth­
quake, when from a Pelasgian it became a Roman settlement.
82 I. 57: · Placia and Scylace. ·
83 Schol. Apollon. 1. 987. Compare 1. 948. Conon 41.
84 Apollon. 1. 1024, comp. with 1112.
85 That Corythus or the city of Corythus must mean Cortona, is admitted:
the passages proving it are collected in Forcellini, and the one from Silius is
decisive. ·Only it must not he overlooked that Virgil, after the manner of the
later school of poetry, takes 'the liberty of using the name somewhat indefi­
nitely in a greater latitude. In the mythologers we find a Corythus, who is a.
Trojan, the son· of Paris: Hellanicus in Parthenius 34.
86 Schol. Apollon. 1. 1024. * Strabo 1x. p. 437. c.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 27

by Carians, Andrus was a Pelasgian island8 7 : the Dryopians of

Cythnus too 111ay be regarded as Pelasgians. The tradition of their
dwelling together with several other races in Crete, must probably,
as in the case of the Dorians named along with them, reter only to
a colony 98 •
With regard to Italy I begin by reminding the reader of those
Pelasgians who were serfs of the Italian Greeks, and that they can
only have been Oenotrians: so that the whole Oenotrian population
of southern Italy m'ust be admitted to be Pelasgian. Next it is
further witnessed by a crowd of authorities, that the Pelasgians
were at one time settled on the coast of Etruria: and we are even
assured by the testimony of Herodotus, that the same people, a race
wholly different from the Etruscans, were .in his days still occupy·
ing a city in the heart of the country; a city Dionysius is certainly
right in supposing t() be Cortona; that is, the Croton which, Hel·
lanicus says, was taken possession of by the Pelasgians, and from
which they sent out colonies. for the peopling of Tuscany 89 • CiEre

87 Conon 41.
88 See the well-known passage of the Odyssey,'!". 175-7 quoted for this
purpose by Strabo v. p. 221, a. .
89 Hellanicus in his Phoronis, quoted by pionysius 1. 28. If the reading
in our editions of Herodotus was Croton, as it is quoted by Dionysius (1. 29),
instead of Creston, no one would fail to perceive that the two contemporane­
ous historians are speaking of the same city. Hellanicus derived these Pe­
lasgians from Thessaly: this is clear, if it were only from the alleged descent
of their kings from Pelasgus and a daughter of Peneus: compare Dionysius
1. 17. Herodotus says, they had formerly dwelt in Thessaliotis. Every
thing makes against any suspicion of Dionysius having corrupted the read­
ing. It seems not to have been heeded, that there is a great chasm he.re in
that family of the Herodotean manuscripts which is incomparably the best
(see Wes·seling's Herodotus, p. 26. a.): if there is no various reading in the
manuscripts ofa bad cast, this proves nothing: they always concur in favour
of what is abs1,ud. Moreover, though there certainly"was a tribe of Cresto­
nmans in Thrace, far inland ·between the Axius and the Strymon, there was
no city of Creston in those parts: and this tribe -were Thracians, while the
Tyrrhenians on mount Athos, beyond whom they dwelt, were Pelasgians: in
Herodotus on the contrary the people of Creston are Pelasgians, and the
Tyrrhenians living to the south of them are a totally different race. On an
unbiassed consideration one cannot but perceive that Herodotus adopted the
account of Hellanicus about the Pelasgians passing out of Thessaly across
the Adriatic to Spina and .Cortona, and assumed that afterward, on being
overpowered by the Etruscans, they emigrated to Athens, himself relating
their further wanderings to Lemnos and along the Hellespont. The identity
of the language spoken by the Pelasgians on the Hellespont and by those
who staid behind in Etruria, was amply sufficient to prove this. Those of
Cortona. were the most westerly, those on the Hellespont the most easterly,
28 HISTORY OF ROl\IE.

too, under the name of Agylla, before it fell into the hands of the
Etruscans, is uniformly represented as a Pelasgian city: and as the
Etruscans left the far great.er part of the old population remaining
in the countries they subdued, this would fully account for the con­
nexion maintained between that city, which with the Greeks did
not lay aside its ancient name, and the Delphic oracle*: even if its .
conqi.iest by the Etruscans was not subsequent to the settlement
of the Phocmans in Cyrnus. The names of Alsium and Pyrgi,
towns on the coast dependent on Agylla, bear the marks of a peo­
ple more than half Greek. I have already noticed that the Agyl­
lceans are termed Thessalianst:, the historian who pronounced Tar­
quinii a city: of Thessalian origin 90 , meant thereby to designate it
as Pelasgian. On the upper sea the same holds of Ravenna,
which is called a Thessalian settlement9 1: this would be at variance
with all history, were it taken in the sa:ne sense in which Syracuse
and Corcyra were colonies of Corinth; for the Thessalians scarcely
touched the seacoast; and had any colonists gone out from Pagasre,
they would never h~ve sailed round Malea and sought out the re­
gions in the interior of the Adriatic. A writer that uses an expres­
sion of this soi:t, must follow Hellanicus, who derived all the Pelas­
gians between Spina and Agylla out of Thessaly; as Pherecydes
did those in the south of Italy from Arcadia. Spina, which as well
as Agylla had its treasury at Delphi0•, a city of such antiquity that
the founding of it was ascribed to Diomedes 93 , and the predecessor
of Venice in the dominion over the Adriatic, is termed a Pelasgian
city by Dionysius 94 ; nor ought 'this statement to forfeit its credit,
from being associated with the migration which was dreamt of by
Hellanicus. But it is a still worse mistake of the later ages, when
the distinction between the Pelasgians and the Greel•s was lost
sight of, to call it a Hellenic city 95 : this is ever erroneous in the
..
of all the remaining Pelasgians; and this gave a reason for naming these and
no others (OO"ct d....,'Ji.AtL Ilod:tcr}'ix1 iovrrct 7roAlr:rfA-a.rra. .,..Q otfvof--tct. p.eTE~a.~e). It
has been thought incredible that the language of small places so far apart
should be compared by Herodotus. This difficulty appears to me of no mo­
ment: a writer who quotes Egyptian, Scythian, and Persian words, was no
more deficient in attention to languages, than we are: this very passage
plainly shows that he was anxious to make out what relation the dialects of
the East and 'Vest bore to each other :the Hellespont he had visited; and na­
tives of Cortona might be easily met with at Thurii.
*, Herodot. I. 1G7. Strabo v. p. 220. e.
t See note G9. · 90 Justin xx. 1.
91 Strabo v. ·p. 214. b. Al)'t'I'~l n'p, 0t'T''T'cthllov 1t'T'l1T/Mt.
!)2 Strabo ~. P· 214. a Pliny III. 20. 93 Pliny II.I. 20.
94 · 1. 18. D5 Strabo v. p. 2'Jl. 'a.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 29

case of all towns in remote countries, founded before the return of

the Ileraclicls.
It is somewhat surprising to find the Roman poet& calling the
Greeks very often Pelasgians: and this, as we are all familiar with
ii from the <lays of our youth and of the JEneid, has <lone more than
any thing else to confirm the fancy that the Greeks and the Pelas­
gians were the same people. I will not determine what degree of
influence may here be due to a misconception of the language used
by the tragic poets, who in fact did not go beyond what they found
in the most ancient traditions about the Pelasgians at Argos and in
Thessaly : • the usage of the Greek epic poets, even of the Alexan­
drian school, no way justifies the Roman. Yet the latter begins
even with Ennius 96 : which leads me to conjecture that, when the
Epirots, the Oenotrians, and .the Siculians had amalgamated with
the Greeks, it grew the custom in Italy to include the Greeks un­
cler the name of the Pelasgians thus united with them.
Scymnus, who here as elsewhere is the representative of Ti­
mams and other ancient writers, says: next to Ligystica, beginning
therefore from the Arno, come the settlements of the Pelasgians 97.
The Greeks who are related to have been the founders of Pisa,
those Teutons 98 who spoke Greek and dwelt there before the Etrus­
cans, must needs have been Pelasgians; and the same is implied
when Pisa is said to have been founded by Tarchon, the Tyr­
rhenian.
Tyrrhenia, we are told by Dionysius, was a name applied of
yore by the Greeks to the whole of western Italy: he is probably
however mistaken in asserting that ·they embraced not only the
Latins, but the Umbrians, Ausonians, and many other tribes, under
the common appellation of Tyrrhenians 99 • In the historical age
the nation peculiarly so called by them, were the Etruscans, with
whom their colonies in Sicily and Italy were continually forming
refations of war and peace, and whose fame stood high even in
Hellas on account of their power, their art, and their wealth. And
even before the Macedonian age it may perhaps have been entirely
forgotten, that the Etruscans had only obtained the name of Tyrrhe­

96 Cum veter occubuit Priamus sub Marte Pclasgo. In Callimachus

(Lavacr. Pall. vv. 4. 51.) TIO.<tO')-Ol and Il•ll.<tO')'la.d'f' are the citizens and
women of Argos.
97 Scymnus v. 216, and foll.
98 Servius on .lEneid. x. 179. It seems impossible that this should be the
right name. See the text to·note 362.
99 · Dionysius 1. 25. 29.
30 HISTORY OF 'ROME.

nians, in consequence of having taken possession of Tyrrhenia and

become the rulers over those Tyrrhenians who had been left behind
in their homes; and that the ancient traditions about the Tyrrhenians
in no way concerned the Etruscans. In like manner it is imagined
by very many to this day, that the Dalmatians of the Sclavonic
race, as they bear the name of Illyrians, are descended from the an­
cient Illyrians who inhabited the same regions, and consequently
that the latter were a Scla\'Onic people; an error which, where it has
once gained a footing, it is useless to combat with the circumstan­
tial e,·idence afforded by the early history of nations.
This confusion gave rise to two opinions, alike untenable and
groundless, on the origin of the Etruscans ; and Dion"ysius with
sound judgment contends against them both. According to the
onc,-which was supported by the account of the, Tyrsenians
given by Herodotus just as he had heard it among the Ionians,
perhaps however without any notion of referring it to the Etrus­
cans,-they wen~ a Lydian race, led to Italy by Tyrrhenus, the
son of Atys: according to the other they were Pelasgians : and this
last has struck root so deep; it so well sorts with an uncritical
and ungrammatical mode of treating the Etruscan language, that
it will scarcely ever be entirely extirpated; unless the most brilliant
discovery of our days, the explanation of the hieroglyphics, should
be followrd by, what there is indeed much less ground to hope fo~,
that of the Etruscan language.
The illtlsion, by which the anrients themselves were misled, is
no every day one. It was evidently the custom at the beginning of
the Peloponnesian war, to call the Pelasgians who had inhabited
Lemnos and lmbrus, Tyrsenians 100 and Tyrnenian Pelasgians:
Thucydides does so, without the slightest intention of displaying
his learning. Now the Argives were also called Tyrsenian Pelas­
gians by Sophocles in the Inachus 1 : this was joined with the
account of Hellanicus 2 , how the Pelasgians, on being dri\'en out of
Thessaly 3 by the Hellens, crossed the Adriatic and landed in the
river of Spina, at the mouth of the Po, and from thence spread into
Tyrrhenia and settled there. , To this account and the conclusions
drawn from it, Dionysius in a spirit of intelligent criticism objects,
that the Etruscans had not the remotest resemblance in language
and laws to the Greeks or the Pelasgians, any more than to the
Lydians, aud that their national traditions described them as a prim­

100 Is there an .instance of the form Tvppnvo' instead of Tvp1Tnva~ in any

writer, whether prosaist or poet, anterior to Plato?
l Dionysius 1. 25. 2 Dionysius 1. 28. 3 Dionysius 1. 17.
 IllSTORY OF ROME. 31

1t1ve race: it is a pity that he did not go a step further, and avail
himself of the information he possessed; to explain the origin of the
mistake.· ·
For, as we know from Dionysius himself,' it was related by
Myrsilus of Lcsb~s, that the Tyrrhenians, in the hope of escaping
from the public calamities with which they were chastised by
heaven, because among other tithes they had not offered up that of
their children 104, quitted their home, and roamed about for a long
time before they again settled in a fixed abode; that, as they were
seen thus gomg forth and returning back, the name of Pelargi, or
storks, was given to them; that they dwelt for a while in Attica, and
that the Pelasgian wall rnund the Acropolis was built by them 5 • This
account, as Dionysius himself remarks, is the very reverse of the
one in Hellanicus: une thing however he could not be struck by,
as we are on surveying an infinitely greater number of traditions;
that this inversion of a story into its opposite is a characteristic of
legendary history 6 • The etymology, whether invented or repeated
by Myrsilus, sounds childish: yet it is easy to see. how it arose
out of the notion that these Pela.sgians, who came· into Greece from
a remote foreign land, must have been totally different from the
primitive Greek race, and that no circumstance could be too fortui­
tous to account for the identity of name7. ·

104 Dionysius 1. 23. 5 Dionysius 1. 28 .

. 6 Since a clear insight into the nature of these inversions removes a
number of stumbling-blocks in the field of legendary history, and turns state­
ments that seem to militate against what is evidently true, into testimonies
for it, I think it may be useful to promote such an insight by a few examples
of very different kinds. The floating rocks which separated the sea frequented
by the Greek mariners from that beyond the reach of their navigation, were
sailed between by the Argo according to one legend under the name of
Cyanere in tlie east, according to another under that of Planctre in the west
of the earth. Thera is the mother-city of Cyrene in Libya: and the island of
Thera is formed out of the clod given to Euphemus by the Libyan god Triton.
One story makes Gillus the Tarentine ransom some Persian captives in Italy
and send them to the Persian king: another makes them Samians who were
in captivity under the Persian king, and one of whom, Pythagoras, is sent by
Gillus into Italy. (See Bentley on the age of Pythagoras: where with a
glance he rebukes the absurdity of trying' to employ such materials as the
ground-work for a couple of stories.) The tradition in Wittekind of Corvey,
that the Saxons came into Germany across the sea, originated in like man­
ner out of their voyage to Britain. And in the sixteenth century we find the
novel of Shylock related as an actual fact; only it is a Christian whose dia­
bolical inexorableness toward a Jew is frustrated by the sentence of a saga­
cious judge, Sixtus V. ­
7 ThP same interpretation of the nam<> was also to be found in the Atthids:
 32 HISTORY OF ROME.

A wandering people, called Pelasgians, had obtained settlements

in Attica at the foot of Ilymettus, after the Dorian migration 108 , on
condition of performing taskwork fur the state 9 • They came
last out of Ilreotia, having some time before acted in concert with
the Thracians in wresting that country from the Caclmeans, who
had now returned from Arne 10 : but their first appearance had been
in Acarnania : and all Pausanias could learn about their extraction,
was that they were Sicelians 11 • That is, so runs the story, they
came from the south of Etruria, where their king J\1aleotes 12 had
resided in the neighbourhood of Graviscro: at all events they must
undoubtedly have called themselves Tyrrhenians 13 • This name re·
mained with their descendants, who abode for a long time in Lem­
nos and Imbrus, and are said to have driven out the Minyro'~ from
thence; afterward, being compelled· by the Athenians to emigrate
anew, they turned their course, aome to the Hellespont 15 , some to
the coast of Thrace and the peninsula of mount Athos. Hence
Thucydides says: Athos is inhabited by a Pelasgian race, the Tyr­
rhenians, who were formerly settled in Attica and Lemnos 16 • These
were the only people known at that time in southern Bellas as
Pelasgians, the Pelasgic extraction of the Epirots and all other·
neighbouring tribes having been forgotten; but as they went no

Strabo v. p. 2.21. d. Others made it allude to white linen clothes: Etymol­

M. v. TieMlp°)'t1<0Y; such explanations however were always with reference
to these Tyrrhenians: the name of the primitive Greek Pelasgians is univer­
sally derived from the ancestor of the race. ·
108 Velleius I. 3. Strabo 1x. p. 401. d. ·
9 Herodotus vi. 137. Pausanias Attic. c. 28.
10 Strabo 1x. p. 401. d. 11 Attic. c. 28.
12 Strabo v. p. 2-23. d. My object here is me~cly to make out the notion
which prevailed among the Greeks, when they had collected their legends in
order to get a history out of them, and which guided the writers followed by
Dionysius'. Else those Sicelians certainly did not come from so far. See
below, note 168.
13 Callimachus quoted by the Schol. on Aristoph. Av. v. 382. TuplThY/JilV
'.rtf}GllT/-"'· Tie>.ot1T°)'t1<or. Other passages are cited in Cluver's Italia Antiqua
p. 428, 42!J. The way in which traditions are confounded, is illustrated by
Polyrenus vu. 4!J: he relates of the Tyrrhenians who were driven from Lem­
nos by the Athenians, and of their wives, the very same story that Herodotus
tells of what had happened to the Minyre GOO years before. 1v. 146.
14 The Minyre likewise were Thessalians and Pelasgiail.s: no one can
seriously hold them to be the descendants of the :Argonauts and of llypsipyle's
subjects: and I suspect, as in the instance of Cyzicus mentioned in note G9,
their expulsion was a mere fabrication, arising out of the story, whethe.r true
or false, about the emigrating of the Tyrrhenians from Athens to these islands.
Ul Hnodotus 1. 57. 16 1v. 109.
 HISTORY OF HOME. 33

less generally by the name of Tyrrhenians, we cannot be surprised

that Sophocles, from whom none will look for historical precision,
applied the two names jointly, as the common propflrty of the
whole nation, to the primitive Pelasgians of Apia. It is just such
a mistake as if one were to call the Cimbrians and Gauls under
Brenn us and Acichorius Welsh Cymri and Irish Gaels.
In the tradition which Aristoxenus followed, Pythagoras was
termed a Tyrrhenian from one of tl1e islands whence that people had
been driven by the Athenians 11 1~ that is, from Lemnos or lmbrus.
These Tyrrhenians of the JEgean sea however were much more
widely spread: on the Hellespont as far as Cyzicus 18 : the pirates
too in the Bacchic fable are not Etruscans, nor are they Lemnians,
but Meonians or Lydians 10 : and that the l\'.Ieonians were Pelasgians
is pro.ved by the stronghold Larissa, which we fiuc.l amongst them,
as in every country inhabited by the Pelasgians 20 • And now the
~trange story of the Lydian colony is explained. Defore the Pelas­
gian and Etruscan Tyrrhenians were confounded, one among the
forms of legendary narrative, in which one pole is continually
shifting into its opposite, derived the Tyrrhenians on the Tiber
from those ill Meonia, as another did from Lemnos and Imbrus 21 ;
whereas the converse, as I have stated it above, was the opinion
commonly adopted. Finally there is an account which jumbles
every thing together; making the Pelasgians emigrate from Thes­
saly to Lydia, from thence to Tyrrhenia; and again leave Tyr­
rhenia22, and go to Athens and subsequently to Lemnos.
It is to the Pelasgian Tyrrhenians, not to the Etruscans, that we
must apply the lines of Hesiod co.ncerning Agrius and Latinus ruling
over all the renowned Tyrrhenians 23 : and if we keep this distinction
steadily in view, an entirely new light is shed over the history of the
countries on the coast of the Tyrrhenian sea: for from the Tiber to
the borders of Oenotria we find tlie settle~ents of the Tyrrhenian
nation, not of the Etruscans.

117 Diogenes Laertius VIII. 1. 18 Conon 41.

, 19 Acmtes is Tyrrhena gente, Ovid Metam. III. 576.; patria Mmonia est,
583: so the Tusca urbs of Lycabas, 624, is unquestionably to be understood
ofa Lydian city. ·
20 Strabo xm. p. 620. d.
21 Such was the account of Anticlides; nay he combined an emigration
fr~m Lydia under Tyrrhenus with one from Lemnos: Strabo v. p. 221. d.
22 Plutarch Romul. c. 2.
23 Hesiod Theogon. v. 1011-15. But what are the sacred i;lands in this
passage? ·

J.-E

34 HISTORY OF HOME.

In a history of the origin of Florence 124, compiled, perhaps even

before the time of Charlemagne, from strange popular legends and
poetical sources, the subjects of Turnus, the Ardeates, are called
Turini; that is, Tyrrheni: the same name presents itself in that of
Turnus, and of the shepherd Tyrrhus 25 ; and was borne without
any change .by a family of the Mamilian house. Ardea is desig­
nated as a Pelasgian city, by the poet who styles it an Argive one
founded by Danae 26 • Now if Ardea is admitted to be a Tyrrhenian
city, the legend which represents Saguntum as a colony of the
Ardeates•7, extends the spreading of the Pelasgians as far as Spain:
where moreover the ancient capital Tarraco has been considered as
a Tyrrhenian city 28 , perhaps indeed only from its name, yet it may
be not erroneously. ·
Virgil, whose catalogue of the army is a work of great judgment
and learning, makes the kingdom of Turnus reach from the Tiber
to Terracina. On this coast we find Antium, the founder of which,
after the Greek manner of personifying, was a son of Circe, and
brother to the founder of Ardea and Rome 29 : and Circeii must be
considered to have been originally a town of the Tyrrhenians, over
the whole of which nation the son of the goddess ruled. Terracina
is said to be the Latin transformation of Trachina 30 ; and lower
down the coast, on the Liris and about it, stood several cities,. such
as Amynche, Hormire, Sinuessa31 ; the names of which, as there
. are many probabilities against their origin being purely Grecian,
lead us to infer that they were Pelasgian; off the coast were the
124 It is preserved in manuscript in Latin, and an Itaiian version of it is
inserted in the chronicle which bears the name of Malespini, where the Tu­
rini occur, c. 9. One of the most perplexing points is the evident reference
of Fresula to the fragment of Hesiod LX. ·
25 The old Latin form of the name must have been Turrus or Turus ~ in
Greek he is also called Tuppn16,.
26 .i'En. vn. 410. comp. 371.
27 Livy xx1. 7. Thus much seems certain, that the Saguntines were not
an unmixed Iberian race.
28 Anton. Augustinus De numis dial. 7. p. 94. b.
29 Dionysius r. 72. . 30 Strabo v. p. 233. a.
31 The authority for Sinope will not stand against that for ~1vot'1'0'1t.
Amyclre may have been identical with Amynclre, (Salmasius ad Solin. p. GO.
b.); and the site at the foot of Taygetus and of l\fassicus, being similar, may
have been designated by the same name. This however has had a remarka­
ble influence on the notions about the settlements on this coast. It was
thought Amynclre must have been founded by the Lacedemonians; hence
their pretended colony near Anxur; and next, when the Sabines and Pelas­
gians were once confounded, the assertion that the former were Lacedemo­
nians.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 35

islands called Pontice; and inland there was the Pelasgian fort, La­
rissa. Ofllerculanum and Pompeii we are told by Strabo, that they
were founded by Pelasgians and Tyrrhenians 132 : of Marcina, near
Salernum, that it was a Tyrrhenian city, which had been occupied
by the Samnites 38 • ·The Tyrrhenians mentioned in these passages
have always been taken to be Etruscans: but that they were Italian
Pelasgians is further indicated by the temple of the Argive Juno in
the neighbourhood of Salernum; a sanctuary of such antiquity that
it was referred to Jason 34• This is a mark of Pelasgic religion,
not of Etruscan: in like manner at Falerii the worship of the same·
Juno was retained under the sovereignty of its Equian citizens,
from the time of the Siculians, as the Tyrrhenians were called by
the Romans" 5 •.
Caprere, it is said, was inbabited by the Teleboans 36, who are
classed by the genealogy among the Lycaonids and the Pelas­
gians37; and the Sarrastians of N uceria were called by Con on Pe­
lasgians from the Peloponnesus and from other quarters 38• This
derivation is not worth more than all the others which aim at ac­
counting· for the presence of that nation in parts so far off from
(;\reece. ·
Thus we find a line of Tyrrh1tnian settlements along the whole
coast of the sea, which for this reason bore their name 39 , from Pisa
down to the borders of the Oenotrians, whose Pelasgic origin needs
no further proof, I now return to the Tiber, to the ground that pe­
culiarly belongs to the history of Rome; and there likewise we may
make out that the Pelasgians were the earliest inhabitants.
The Roman historians related that the first people who settled
on the banks of the lower Tiber, were the Siculians, who dwelt at
Tibur, Falerii, and a number of little towns about Rome: the same
people are also called Argives by them, as Argos was termed Pe­
lasgian; and hence it is that Tibur and Falerii are represented as
Argive colonies. Moreover the original inhabitants of Latium, as
such, weI)t by the name of Aborigines: of whom Cato and C. Sem­
pronius wrote, that they were Achreans, and had already been set­
tled here many generations before the Trojan war: so that they as­
sumed this tri~e to have emigrated thus early from the Pelopon­

132 v. p. 247. a. 33 v. p. 251. b.

34 Pliny 1u. 9. 35 Dionysius 1. 21.
36 Virgil .iEn. vu. 735. 37 Seep~ 25.
38 Servius on .iEn. vn. 738.
39 In conformity with this usage, Sophocles in the passage quot.ed above
(p. 14, nste 30) called the Gulf the Tyrrhcnian; and the sea kept the name.
 HISTORY OF ROME.

nesus 140•• But JJ.clueans was another among the Pelasgic names for
the inhabitants of the country afterward called Ilellas. These Si­
culians, Argives, Tyrrhenians, whichever one chooses to call them,
were overpowered by a strange people that came down from the
mountains of the Abruzzo: the name of the conquerors, who became
one people with the conquered, and were called Latins, was for­
gotten: Varro by an enormous over;;;ight transferred to them that of
Aborigines: and Dionysius in following him lost himself in a laby­
rinth. He pieced together the most heterogeneous statements, the
accounts of Roman chronicles with those of Hellanicus and Myr­
silus, so as to make the Sicelians* barbarians, and the foes of the
Pelasgians and Aborigines: whereas he ought to have seen that the
people denoted by all these three names was the same ; . and, the
very thing he wished, a people akin to the Greeks.
This subjugation of the Sicelians in Latium and in the countries
more to the south, which made a portion of them leave their homes,
is what was regarded as the cause of their emigrating under the
name of Tyrrhenians to the eastern parts of Greece, and of their
crossing over into Sicily: this is the flight of Sicelus from Rome to
the Italian king l\1orges 41 • The date of this event I shall not dream
of fixing chronologically: it is no matter to us, that Philistus placed
it eighty years before the Trojan war, and Thucydides, probably
following Antiochus, two centuries later•~: I shall return hereafter
to this earliest authenticatea event in Italian story*. This however
is the place to notice that Sikelus and !talus, according to manifold
analogy, are the same name 43 • 1Vhen the Locrians first settled in
Italy, they found Sicelians by mount Zepliyrium 44 : the same peo­
ple were still there, in the southernmost part of Calabria, during the
Peloponnesian war: Thucy<lides gives the name of Sicelians to the
ltalietes of Antiochus, and that of I talus to their king's: Morges,

140 . Dionysius 1. 11.

* The name of the selfsame people is spelt Siculian or Sicelian, according
as the authority referred to is a Latin writer ot a Greek: for the :l:ixti..oi were
by the Romans called Siculi.
41 Dionysius 1. 73.
, 42 That is, 300 years before the first Greek settlement in Sicily: vi. 2.
The statement of Philistus ia in Dionysius 1. 2'2.
* In the section on the Aborigines and the Latins.

43 · Vitalus and Sitalus would be like :l:eHo, and "EHnv (Aristot. Meteorol.

1. 14. p. 33. Sy lb.): T and Kare interchanged as in Latinus and Lakinius.

44 Polyb. xn. 5.

45 T~ucy~. :1. 2. Duker's text retained the reading 'Apvl,J0, , : which

mu11t owe its ongm to the notion that the Oenotria11s had come out of Arcadia.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 37

whom Antiochus calls king of the Oenotrians, is, in a legend evi.

tlently of very great antiquity, termed King of Sicilia' 46 ; and, to
make it clear that this name embraced the whole of the Italy inhab­
ited by the Oenotrians in its widest range, Siris is represented as
his daughter. In a statement preserved by Servins 47 , Italus king
of the Siculians is said to have led that people from Sicily to Latium:
an inversion in a traditional narrative, which I may henceforth deem
it superfluous to notice particularly: it is enough, this story is a
new proof of the Oenotrians and the Sicilian Tyrrhenians forming
one nation; that of the Italians, in the widest extent given to the
name by the natives of the peninsula.
Of the Pelasgian tribes on the coast it was natural that the
Greeks should often be led to make mention: but their poets and
geneaologers had seldom occasion to say any thing about the inte­
rior of the country. Still, as the existence of a people akin to the
Greeks has been established by_ the names of places on the coast
of the lower sea about the Liris, so we are convinced by like traces
in the interior, that the territory between the two seas was also in­
habited by the same nation, until that nation was overpowered or
driven out by the foreign tribes of the Opicans and Sabellians.
Such traces are furnished by the names Acherontia; Telesia, Ar­
gyrippa, Sipontum, Maleventum, Grumentum 48 : and the whole
country from sea to sea, over which these places are scattered, is
what the natives called Italia.
Hellanicus, we must suppose, knew of no other Pelasgians on
the Adriatic than those of Spina; or he surely would not have
brought them into Tuscany by so circuitous a road. But in ac­
counts of the very highest authority we meet with Pelasgians along
the whole coast from the A tern us to the Po. Picenum, goes the

146 Etymolog. M. v. ~ip": probably after Timreus: Athenreus XII. p.

523. e.
47 On .lEn. 1. 2. 533.
48 In the south of Italy and Sicily the Greek names of the third declen­
sion in"' and ovc, of the masculine gender, were usually changed in Latin
into neuters of the second declension -in entum, formed from. the genitive.
This is said to have been a form in the JF.tolian di_alect; only here the termi­
nation was tnor, and therefore masculine (Salmas. ad Solin. p. 46. b. E.);
and tl/.e change is analogous to that which the modern Greek has made in the
nominative. So Acragas, Taras, Pyxus, became Agrigentum, Tarentum,
Buxentum, and so on. That Maleventum or 1\1a.Ioentum, in the country
afterward called Samnium, would in pure Greek have been Maloeis or Mal us,
was perceived by Salmasius: and I believe I am not mistaken in supposing
Grumentum, a place on the highest part of the cold Lucanian hills, to be
KpvfA-6m. The ~ame character is discernible in Laurentum.
38 HISTORY OF ROME.
tradition, was in the hands of the Pelasgians, before it was occupied
by the Sabellian colony 149 ; and Pliny informs us, we may be pretty
sure from Cato, that, prior to the U mbrians, the Siculians were
masters of that coast on which the Senones settled in the fifth cen­
tury of Rome; where stood Ravenna, which is called a Thessalian
city*; and that they likewise possessed the districts of Prretutium,
Palma, and Adria 50 , It is therefore most probably this Hadria,
and not the very recent colony of the Syracusan tyrant, that was
classed by Trogus among the towns in Italy of Greek origin 51 • In
its neighbourhood stood Cypra, called by Strabo a Tyrrhenian
city59 ; which must also refer, not to the Etruscans, but the ancient
Tyrrhenians. On the coast of the Gallic part of Picenum was Pi­
saurum, the Greek coins of which show· that its inhabitants were
not U mbrians or Sabellians: they may have been a Greek settle­
ment from Ancona, or on the other hand Tyrrhenians and Siculians
who had maintained their independence.
Pliny further says, that together with the Siculians the· Libur­
nians had inhabited the. coast of Picenum, and that .a Liburnian
city called Truentum had continued in existence amid all the changes
of the population53 : not however assuredly that it retained a dis­
tinct character down to the time of Pliny; this can only have been.
visible to Cato, whom Pliny inconsiderately transcribed from.
Hence it looks as if both sides of the Adriatic had been inhabited
by the Illyrians: and this is no way surp;ising; whether we sup­
pose them to have crossed the gulf and thus spread from one coast to
the opposite, or to have been settled in this manner from a much
earlier time·. But that eitremely accurate and trustworthy writer,
Scylax, draws a very positive and express line of distiilction be­
tween. the Liburnians on the eastern coast and the lllyrians 54, as a
totally different race: and the name Truentum has the Pelasgic
form to which I have before called the reader's attention 55 , At the
time when our historical accounts of these coasts begin, the Libur­
nians were very extensively diffused. Corcyra, before the Greeks
took possession of it, was peopled by them56 ; so was Issa and the

149 Ante, ut fama docet, tellus possessa Pelasgis: Silius vm. 445.
* Above note 91.
50 Pliny m. 19. 51 Justin xx. I.
52 v. p. 241. b. 53 m. 18. 19.
,54 Peri pl. p.' 7. M•'Ttt t• A1~upvo?J, &lcrlv 'IA7'.up101 Wvo,, 1<.:tl 1rctp011<oucr11
oi 'IMup101 '7l"ttptt B.t>.tt'T'T~r p.1)(,pl Xttovltt, 'TH' l<tJ.'Ti Kip&Uf<J,V.
55 n.148.
56 Strabo vi. p. 20!:1. d.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 39

neighbouring islands 157: and thus they form a link between the Pe­
lasgians of Epirus and those in Italy on the coast of the upper
sea •• themselves~! venture the conjecture-a Pelasgian race. In
fact, long before the time when our history happens t'o commence,
the face of Europe had been changed by migrations not inferior in
power or in the multitudes that took part in them, to those which
gave rise to the later revolutions in the destiny of nations; and such
a movement of countless hosts, no recollection of which would have
remained but for a merely incidental mention without any indica­
tion of the date, was the expedition of the Illyrian Encheleans, who
seem to have penetrated into the heart of Greece, and even to
have sacked Delphi58 • I conceive this must have been a migra­
tion of the whole Illyrian people from far-off northern countries;
and I believe that the earlier Pelasgian population in Dalmatia,
which was overpowered by them, was not quite exterminated.
'Ve read of Pelagonians on this coast*; an Epir~t race of the same
name occurs on the confines· of Macedonia and Thessaly: and
when -it is said that tl).e Hylli were· Greeks who had been bar­
barizedt, the correct presumption is, that they were a branch of the
Pelasgians, not of the remote Hellens, who did not became power­
ful and numerous till late.
Herodotus, whose statement concerning the Teucrian origin of
the Preonians 59 on the Strymon is not more vague than others of
his on similar points, must certainly have conceived that they re­
mained behind there during the march of the Teucrians and My­
sians, prior to the Trojan war, when these nations were overrun­
ning the countries down to the Ionian sea. Unquestionably they
were neither Thracians nor Illyrians; and so there is no family
with which we have better grounds for connecting these Pa:onians
on the Strymon, than with that of the Macedonians and Bottireans.
On the other hand it continues a matter of doubt whether the later
Greeks were justified in considering the Pannonians as Preonians.
It is worthy of remark however with regard to this point, that the
Pannonians must have had a very great facility for acquiring the
Latin language; since under Augustus, a very short time after they

157 Schol. Apollon. IV. 564. Of their extension toward the north I shall
speak lower down: see notes 503-505.
58 Herodot. IX. 43. Comp. Eurip. Bacch. 1333, and Musgrave's note.
* Strabo. vu. p. 326. c. · t Scymnus. vv. 407-410.
59 v. 13. vu. 20. 75. From the catalogue in the Iliad it certainly appears
that the supremacy of Troy extended over Thrace and beyond the Strymon
even down to mount Olympus. '
40 HISTORY OF ROME.

became dependent upon Rome, the use of it was generally diffused

among them 160 : in the same manner it is in Pmonia and upper
Macedonia, and in the territory of the Epirot tribes on the borders
of Thessaly, that the Walachian tongue arose; .while the lllyrians
retained the Schypian.
I am anxious to close my stq.tement of these researches; for in
proporti.on as the extent they assign to the Pelasgians increases, so,
I am aware, do the scruples they are likelito raise: I take leave to
reserve notices concerning lapygia of the same kind with those
hitherto produced, until I collect the acrounts left of that country:
where the Pcucetians, no less than the Oenotrians in the south west,
were derived by Pherecydes from Pelasgus; and where what is re­
lated of lllyrian immigrations, ought perhaps to be referred to the
Liburnian inhabitants. I am standing at the goal, and from it a
survey may be taken of the circle in which I have found and proved
the existence of Pelasgian tribes, not as vagrant gypsies, but firmly
settled, as powerful, respectable nations, in a period for t~ie greater
part anterior to our Grecian history. Nor is it as a hypothesis,
but with full historical conviction, that I say, there was a time when
the country from the Po and the Arno to the R,hyndacus was in­
habited by the Pelasgians, then perhaps more widely spread than
any other people in Europe; only the line of their possessions was
broken in Thrace, so that the chain between the Tyrrhenians of Asia
and the Pelasgia:i. city of Argos was kept up by the isles in the
north of the lEgean.
· But when the genealogers and Ilellanicus wrote, all that was left
of this immense race, were solitary, detached, widely scattered
remnants, such as those of the Celtic tribes in' Spain; like moun­
tain-peaks that tower as islands, where the plains have been turned
by floods into a sea. Like those Celts, they were conceived to be,
not fragments of a great people, but settlements formed by colo­
nizing or emigration, after the manner of the Grecian which lay
similarly dispersed. This being once assumed· as necessary,-and,
so soon as the vast original magnitude and extent of the nation were
lost sight of, this notion naturally suggested itself-it seemed to be
at all events deducible from all the circumstances and consistent
with all the relations of the case, that the Tyrrhenians at. Cortona
shoul:l have come from Spina at the mouth of the Po: this how­
ever does not make the account given by Hellanicus of the slightest
value in a historical point of view; any more so than those which

160 Velleius 11. 110. In omnibus Pannoniis non disciplime tantummodo

zed linguw quoque notitia Romanw.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 41

<lescribe the pretended expeditions of Odin and the Asai from the
Tanais into Scandinavia.
Pherecydes had not the same grounds, which justified Hellanicus
in the c~se of the insulated Pelasgians at Spina and' Cortona, for
assuming that the Oenotrian's and Peucetians, to whom he should
also have added the Sicelians in the island, had migrated from
Ilellas. What imposed upon him, was the fallacy, which is still
so general, that tribes of a common stock must have sprung genea­
logically by ever-widening i:amifications from a single root. This
fallacy escaped detection among the ancients, owing perhaps to their
admitting a number of originally different races of men. They
who deny such a plurality, and mount up to a single pair of ances­
tors, mast devise a miracle to account for the diversities in the
bodily structure of the different races; ~bile they cling to that of
the confusion of tongues, as a solution for the diversities in such
languages as are 'essentially and radically distinct. The assumption
of such miracles is not an offence against reason: for, since the
ruins of a former world manifestly show that, before the present
order of things, another must have existed, it is certainly conceiv­
able that the present order should at one time have undergone a
material change, and yet not have been totally interrupted, The
offender against reason is he who distorts the laws of experience,
that without regard to truth he may maintain the conceivableness of
what directly contradicts them. In matters of history reason de­
mands our acknowledging that the origin of things lies in every case
beyond the sphere of our notions, which comprehend only their de­
velopment and progress; and accordingly the historical inquirer
will confine himself to going backward from one step of time to
another. In doing so he will frequently find tribes of the same
stock, that is, having the same peculiar features of character and
language, on the opposite coasts of the same sea; for instance the
Pelasgians in Greece, in Epirus, and in the south of Italy: without
being any way justified in assuming that one of these separate re­
gions was the original home whence a part of the inhabitants emi­
grated to the other. · In like manner we find the Iberians on the
islands of the Mediterranean; the Celts in Gaul and in Britain: an·d
this is analogous to the geography of the animal and vegetable
kingdoms; the great circles of which are separated by mountains,
and inclose narrow seas 16 1. ' ·

161 The author of a remark by which prejudices are irritated, must guard
it against misconstructions. I am far from meaning to assert that those ex-
1.-F
42 HISTORY OF ROME.
The further we go back into antiquity, the richer, the more dis­
tinct, and the more broadly marked, do we find the dialects of great
languages: they subsist one beside the other, with the same origi­
nality and in the s~me manner as if they were totally different
tongues. The existence of a universal German or Greek language
from the beginning is a mere idea: it is when the dialects, after be­
ing impoverished and enfeebled, become extinct, and when reading
grows to be general, that a common language arises. Nor do
languages ever intermix, except where whole tribes, or large masses
<>f people, such as slaves that have been imported in swarms, are
forced to adopt a strange one. In like manner do we find new
forms arising in the corporeal world: and these may deviate further
from the type whence they sprang, than other kinds which are
essentially different.
In a rich family oflanguages one dialect will diverge from another,
until it rather deserves the name of a sister tongue; without however
having any thing yet in it essentially foreign. Bu~ as we find tran­
sitions in nature with 'regard to other things, so do we find them in
the human race with regard to languages: in many we see marks
of an affinity to two others, which, especially in their roots, are
entirely strangers: and when this is the case without our discove~­
ing any certain traces of violent alteration in the forms of the words,
it is illogical to presume that such a language must be a new one
produced by the intermixture of th~ other two. Sometimes too we
may look i.n vain for a language, to which the foreign element
whence it receives its peculiar .character, can belong.
Thus two languages may in some respects be nearly akin, in
others altogether alien. Such is the relation between the Sclavonic
and Lithuanian, perhaps also between the Gaelic and Welsh: in this
manner the Persian is connected with the Sclavonic in many of its
forms. and roots. In Latin there are two elements mixed up to­
gether; one ,connected with the Greek, the other entirely foreign to
it. But even in the former the distinction is no le.ss evident than
the affinity: and it was just the same with the Pelasgians and
Greeks as races: hence it came that the latter, notwithstanding

tensive seats of the Pelasgians were their original country from the beginning
of the human race: however high we may rise toward that epoch, still the an­
nals of the Egyptians and Babylonians would not fill up more than a small
part of the inscrutable period during which nations must have been in no less
active collision than in after times. I only protest against the building on an
as1umption which is utterly unfounded.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 43

their affinity, could look on the former as foreigners, and call their
language a barbarous one 16•.
The Oenotrians, as the Greeks, and possibly the Greeks alone,
called them, dwelt in Bruttium and Lucania: for, befo're the irrup­
tion of the Sabellians, the west coast also as far as Posidonia belonged
to Oenotria63 ; it was he~e that Elea was founded by the PhocceansB 4 ;
her€) too lay the Oenotrid islands'*. Two distinct tribes of Oeno­
trians are spoken of: the Italietes, in the southernmost peninsula; the
Choni::ins to the north, without the isthmus, stretching up to lapygia.
The former are said to have led a pastoral life, until, long before
the age of Minos, they were induced by I talus, a powerful, wise, and
heroic man, partly by persuasion and partly by constraint, to betake
themselves to tillage, and to submit to laws: being thus moulded
into a new people by him, they named themselves and their terri­
tory after him. His laws established syssitia or public meals for
the men," to which each fumished his prescribed share~ This cus­
tom, with some other laws attributed to !talus, was preserved down
to a very late period, as long as any remains of the nation were to
be found 65 • •

The story in which the ltalietes are represented as splitting into

two hostile tribes, the Sicelians and the Morgetes, can only be
considered as a mythical way of recording that the former, a people
powerful in their own island, were descended and had separated
from the Oenotrians. ~lse the name of the Sicelians, .as I have
ah:eady remarked 66, was equivalent to that of the Italians; it com­
1_62 Aristotle says (Meteorolog. 1. 14.) the Hellens were called rp,,,'ix.01 at
the time they were inhabiting the highest mountain land of Epirus; and, as
is well known, that name was used by Callimachus and by Alexander the
lEtolian. The'Se poets belonged to a school fond of hunting out for every
rare word to ornament their diction: in Latin however the name of Gr<Eci was
not imported out of books, but was in use from time immemorial together with
Graii; the latter being in early times the prevalent form. It will be found to
· be a 'general rule· in the old Latin, that nations had several names; a simple
one and derivatives from it: such as Graii and Graici. Aristotle's account
was most probably derived from the Epirot 1.0')'101, a~d the name was a Pe­
lasgic one; in this way it c~me to the RomanS'; and we can easily explain
how an lEtolian happened to use it.
63 Dionysius 1. 73. Scymnus Chiils v. 243. 244.

0
G4 'EvrH<T<tV'To 7ro/\lv iii> 'l''ii> '01vtJ1'l'fln; 'l'<t.UTnv li-1'1; vu• Tihn Z<<tAtl'l'<U.

Herodot. 1. 167. * Pliny m. 7.

65 Aristot. Polit. vu. 10. p. 198. Sylb. Dionysius 1. 35: both after Antio­

clms. Aristotle's ildding, these laws are even now still in force (Z<<t.l vuv 1'1'1),

is certainly surprising: it is scarcely possible that there 'should have been any

Oenotriana in the fifth century living according to their own laws.

66 See above 'p. 36, note 143. · ·

44. llISTORY OF RO.ME.
prehends the Chonians also 167, and thus corresponds entirely with
that of the Oenotrians: nay it extends across the Ionian sea amongst
the Epirots, where Echetus, who ruled at Bucheta6 ~, is called king of
the Sicelians. In the Odyssey, when this name occurs, the people
meant seem to be the Epirots 69 : and thus we get a solution for the
origin of those Tyrrhenians who migrated to Athens, in the mention
of their having come out of Acarnania. Not that they had sailed
from the Tiber and halted there : but they were P~lasgians of Epi­
rus; at the time represented in the catalogue of the Greek army
before Troy, that people were still masters of this country, whicb,
like Thesprotia, did not yet form a part of Greece.
That the Epirots and Oenotrians were branches of the same
nation, is a fact of which yet further indications are supplied by the
geographical names, and those surer than such arguments are usu­
ally. In Aristotle's account of the Oenotrians, the reading, before
it was altered by Victorius, was not Clwnes, but Chaones7°: and
in whatever way the name of that.extinct race was spelt by Aris­
totl!), it is no less certain that it was the same on both coasts of the
Ionian sea, than that the l\folossian king Alexander found to his
ruin, there was a Pandosia and a river Acheron in Oenotria as well
as in Thesprotia*.
This Pandosia had been the seat of the Qenotrian kings71 : the
town 'of Chone, in the territory of Crotona7 ~, is a proof that at all
events the whole of Oenotria to the north of the isthmus belonged
to the land of Chonia or Chone 73. But there were also Chonians
in the Siritis and at Polieum, found there by the Ionians who were
driven from Colophon by the Lydians; and these fugitives, being
perhaps rendered ferocious by their misfortunes, inhumanly slaugh­
tered them74 • The taking of Colophon may be dated about the
25th Olympiad, the year of Rome 75 75 : and soon after comes the

167 According to an ancient fable, which calls Siris the daughter of Mor­
ges, and her husband Scindus: Etymol. M. v. "J:.ip".
68 Schol. on the Odyssey "Ji.. 85.
· 69 I have proved this in .the Rhenish Museum 1. p. 256.
70 It is owing only to the learning of Demetrius Chalcocondylas, that his
manuscript anticipates this emendation. In Strabo also, xiv. p. 654. d, we
find Chaonia instead of Clwne or Chonia.
* Livy VIII. 24. 71 Strabo VI. p. 256. b.
72 Strabo VI. p. 254. b. 73 Casaubon on Strabo, p. 255. •
74 Strabo VI. p. 264. b. compared with Athenreus XII. p. 523: c. (where
i1t/2t.~9iv•m should be inserted after KoAO~"'vi,.v) and Aristotle Polit. VII. 10.
75 Under Gyges: who according to Herodotus, supposing the date of the
fall of Sardis to be determinate, reigned from 01. 15. 3 to 25. 1: according to
 HISTORY OF ROl\lE. 45

ongm of the Ionian city of Siris. The dominion over its rich
plains was for years the subject of a feud between Tarentum and
Sybaris ; these states at the height of their greatness continuing to
keep up the hereditary hatred which prevailed between the Dorians
and Achieans. To exclude Tarentum from the Siritis, the Syba­
rites procured the founding of l\Ietapontum. As to the date of this
we are unfortunately without any information; it is therefore only
by conjecture, but without risk of going very far wrong, that we
can place the wars of the Metapontines against Tarentum and the
Oenotrians of the interior 176 , which were terminated by a cession
of territory on the part of the former, about the middle of the se­
cond century. So at that tillle there were still independent Oen­
o.trians. Subsequently however far the g~eater part of the count~y
afterward called Lucania must have been subject to Sybaris. The
statement indeed that her citizens amounted to three hundred thou­
sand,. is at the least uncertain-although, supposing that number to
embrace all who had the rights of isopolity, it is not to be rejected
as utterly jmpossible-and so is that which assigns the same num­
b~r~to the army she sent against the Crotoniats: there is no ground
however for entertaining any doubt touching the four nations and
five and twenty cities said to have been subject to her77: and her
founding Posidonia and Laos on the lower sea shows that the do­
minion of Sybaris reached from coast to coast; these colonies being
evidently designed to protect her frontiers. In like manner Terina
was founded by Croton on the lower sea; as were Hipponium
and Medma by Locri. To this period, under the dominion of all
the Italian Greeks, and not of the Sybarites alone, are we to look
for the general bondage of the .Pelasgians7 8 ; that is, of t11e Oeno­
trians in the immediate territory of the cities ; although in several
districts it certainly lasted much longer. Many thousands however
had a happier lot; fol' immense numbers were admitted to the rights

Eusebius, froni 01. 20. 2 to 29. 1. The latter statement seems to ·rest on the
authority of Apollodorus: as I conclude more especially because Eusebius
names Archilochus, the contemporary of Gyges, under the last mentioned.
Olympiad, and Nepos, who followed Apollodorus, :r:µakes him flourish in the
reign of Tullus Hostilius. (See Gellius xvu. 21.) The praise bestowed by
Archilochus on the Siritis (in Athenreus xu. p. 523. d.) was occasioned by
the success of that Ionian settlement at a distance from the barbarian con-.
querors.
176 TI0>.1µount1.' wpo, .,.,u,TttptJ.nirou' ,.,.; <rou, V7r<pu1µbw, Oir,.<rpo6,.
Strabo vr. p. 265. a.
77 Strabo vr. p. 2G3. b.
78 Above, p. 21. and n. 58.
46 HISTORY OF ROME.
of citizenship 1 10: this is the only way of explaining how Sybaris and
Croton had inhabitants to fill a range of walls, a very small portion
of which would have sufficed for the descendants of the first set­
tlers ; and of this plebeian population the main part must have been
natives of the country, chiefly Pelasgians.
Whether the whole of the Sybarite territory fell under the power
of Croton, is not known; nor how long that city maintained the
predominance she had a;quired. The period of her most flourishing
condition does not seem to have been long; and when she too had
fallen from her eminence, a part of her subjects may have recovered
their freedom. When Antiochus however drew the boundary of
Italy from the Laos to Metapontum, in 32!), the Oenotrians to the
west of that line had already been subjugated by the Lucanians;
not expelled80 : hence this coast, though no longer accounted a part
of Italy, is still called Oenotria81 • The time of migrations was
gone by; it was more profitable to the conqueror to have tributary
subjects than herds of slaves that he was to buy: and that the. main
part of the inhabitants in Lucania did not belong to the ruling Sa­
bellian race, is proved by the fewness of the Lucanians in the
census taken in the Cisalpine war8 ~. It may be conjectured that
even by Antiochus the Chonians had been spoken of as an extinct
race, as they are by Aristotle 83 : not that they had been extirpated
by the inhumanity of the sovereign Greek cities on the west coast
of the Tarentine gulf; the cause of their disappearance was, that
they did not ev\O!n form dependent townships, but were degraded to
a state of villanage, and adopted the language and habits of the
Greeks 84 ; as was done, under circumstances far less oppressive, by
iheir kinsmen, the Sicelians of the .island85 ; and by the Epiiots;
who by Polybius are not distinguished from the Greeks, although
the wild tribes of the JEtolian mountains are so.
The facility with which they were thus moulded into Greeks, is
a characteristic of the Pelasgian tribes, and a main cause of the
breaking up and extinction of the nation. It is natural to view it as
a result of .the original affinity between the two races, which yet
179 Diodor. xn. 9.
80 As Strabo erroneously words it: 'l'OOV :Ectm'l'1»V ctu~~BivT1»1 awl ?ro;..u, Jtttl
-rour Olv,.,Tpour 01<,'9ct;..6vTwv. vi. p. 253. b. ·
81 Above p. 14, note 33.
82 30,000 foot and 3000 horse: Polybius 11. 24.
83 Polit. vn. 10. ~O'tt1 i<ctl oi Xoom Oiv,.,Tpol TO "'vor.
84 Pandosia, the ancient residence of the Oenotrian kings, is called in the
time of Philip a Greek city: Scylax p. 4.'
85 Diodorus v. 6.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 47
were not on that account the less essentially different; and such I
believe to have been the case: yet we may observe a magical power
exercised by the Greek language and national character over foreign
races that came in contact with them, even ''vhere no S'Uch affinity
can be supposed. The inhabitants of Asia i\linor began to be
hellenized from the time of the Macedonian conquest, though very
few genuine Greeks settled amongst them: Antioch, though· the
language of the common people was a barbarous one, became al­
together a Greek city; and the entire transformation of the Syrians
was averted only by their Oriental inflexibility. Nay the Albanians,
who have settled as colonies in modern Greece, have adopted the
Romaic language by the side of th~ir own, and in several places
have forgotten the latter: it was in this way alone that the immortal
Suliotes were Greeks; and even the noble Ilydriotes, whose de­
struction we shall perhaps have to deplore before the publication
of this volume, are Alpanian settlers,
In the growth of so numerous a Greek population in Oenotria,
we find a justification for the name of Magna Grrecia. That the
change 'vas complete, appears from the language of the Bruttians
being Greek, though the Oscan had also been introduced'*; and by
the Romans they we.re considered so much in the light of foreigners,
that, in the enumeration of the Italian forces for. the Cisalpine war,
their fighting men, like those of the Greek cities, are omitted.
Calabria, as well as Sicily, continued to be a Grecian land, though
the Romans planted colonies on the coasts: the Greek languaga
did not begin to give way there till the fourteenth century; and it
is known to have prevailed not three hundred years since at Ros­
sano, and no doubt much more extensively; for our knowledge of
the fact as to that little town is merely accidental: indeed even at
this day there is a population that speaks Greek remaining in the
district of Locri 1 • 6• ·

At the time of the Peloponnesian war there were Sicelians still

* See note 310.

186 For the assurance of this fact, which is stated doubtfully in several
books of travels, I am indebted to the Neapolitan minister, Count Zurlo;
whose learning precludes the possibility of his having confounded the natives
with the Albanian coloni_es. I seize this opportunity of adorning my descrip­
tion of the nations belonging to the golden age of Italy, with the name of a
man, whom the shades of the ancient Samnites would rejoice in as their worthy
descendant, the last survivor of that intellectual prime of Naples, which after
blooming for a century was extinguished in blood in 179!): may he accept
this offering of veneration.
48 IIISTORY OF ROME.

existing in the southernmost parts of lt:ily 1 •7; and they must have
formed distinct communities, even though they may have been de­
pendent on more powerful states; since they still preserved their
Nyssitia and other hereditary institutions'"· I refer this to the time
of Antioch us: ninety years later, when Aristotle wrote, it seems
quite out of the question. It is true, some twenty years before, the
southern half of Lueania, which as then extended to Rhegium 89 ,
had separated itself and formed an independont people; and their
name of revolted slaves 90 , which the insurgents accepted as a term
of defiance, authorizes us in rejecting the silly tale that they were
J,ucanian youths exasperated by hard treatment, and in looking for
their origin to the ancient serf);• in supposing that such Oenotrians
as remained, being strengthened by the accession of Oscan free­
booters, after the power of the Greek cities was broken by the Lu­
canians, had in this manner rcovered their freedom. But this was
a new epoch; and ,;hen the Bruttians arose,. they were a new
people, little likely to retain any primitive institutions. .
·when the Roman arms reached these parts, there was no people
in Magna Grrecia except Lucanians, Bruttians, and Greeks: the
Oenotrians were known solely to the learned, and m the writings
of the Italian Greeks.

187 Thucydides v1. 2: .88 Aristotle Polit.. vn. 10.

89 This extent is ascribed ta it by Scylax.
90 Bruttians: Strabo v1. p. 255. b. Dio~orus xvi. 15.
 THE OPICANS AND AUSONIANS.

THE country between Oenotria and Tyrrhenia was by the Greeks

called Opica or Ausonia. Aristotle says: on the borders of the
Oenotrians, toward Tyrrhenia, dwelt the Opicans, formerly and
to this day known by the additional name of Ausonians 1 0 1 : he does
not confine' their country to Campania; for he terms Latium also
a district of Opica9 9 , Cuma in Opica was distinguished by that
adjunct from the one in .l.Eolis: Nola was called by Ilecatreus an
Ausonian city 03 ; by others it would be called an Opican one.
The south-east boundary may be regarded as indeterminate, and
may have been enlarged with the conquests of the Samnites in
Oenotria: there is also an indeterminateness in the Roman account,
that Ausonia was once the name of the country between the Apen­
nines and the lower sea94 • The notion that Temesa, which lay
far to the south, and from which the Greeks of the Homeric age
drew their, copper 95 , was founded by the Ausonians 96 , seems to
rest only on a misunderstanding of the expression used by an Al­
exandrian poet97.
It is an erroneous notion, occasioned by an inaccuracy of language,
that the territory occupied by the Alisonians in the earliest time is
extended by Aristotle at least as far south as the Silarus. If we
suppose a line carried along mount Garganus and the ridge of hills
which form the northern border to the valley of Beneventum, and
prolong it to the Vulturnus somewhere between Telesia and Allifai,
the whole coast and country to the south of it still belonged to the

191 Polit. vn. 10.

92 'E>-.B'i'iv ('TtoV 'A;t.«lll" 'TIV«' f-U'T<t. >Tilv 'H.fou ,,_•,._"'rnv) eh 'TO,' 'TO?Tot
'Toii>Tov .,.;;, 'O?T11til, 6, """'i'T<tl Arlmov, t?l'l 'T'f TvppHVll<lf m>-.a'.j>u "'lf<tVO'.
Dionysius 1. 72.
93 Stephanus Byz. v. Nr.f""· 94 Fest. Epit. v. Ausoniam.
95 Odyss. it.. 184. 96 Strabo. v1. p. 255. c.
97 See above, p. 18, note 49.
1.-G
50 HISTORY OF ROME.

Tyrrhenians and Italians, long after the establishment of the Greek

settlements in Italy. Hence the land of the Opicans contained
only the northern districts of Samnium 198 : and there remained a
recollection that the land about Cales and Beneventum was the
country first called Ausonia99 •
Aristotle tell tts that Opican was the general name of the nation,
.flusonian the particular name for a branch of it 200 : in this passage
again he unquestionably had Antiochus before him ; which renders
it clear in what sense we are to understand the statement quoted
from the latter, that the Ausonians and Opicans were the same
people 1 • It is a common source of the most perplexing confusion
with regard to the ages of legendary history, that many nations
consisted of several tribes, which are sometimes spoken of under
their own name, sometimes under the common one : and thus,
when one story talked of Pelasgians, another of Sicelians or Tyr­
rhenians, as the inhabitants of a country, it was commonly sup­
posed even among the ancients that they were two races which had
dwelt there either together or successively. So Polybius has spoken
of the Opicans and Ausonians as two different nations inhabiting the
coast around the bay of N aples 2 : for no ·one is endowed with every
gift ; and that excellent historian of the period which lay immedi­
ately before his view, as he felt no interest in investigating primitive
history, is of no authority on such points. In like manner Strabo
distinguishes the Ausonians from the Oscans, making the former
the earlier inhabitants of Campania, the latter a tribe that occupied
the country after them 3 • A writer, whom he quotes without naming
him, carries the erroneous subdivision still further, speaking of
Opicans, Ausonians and Oscans, as having inhabited Campania in
succession; then came the Cumans, after them the Tyrrhenians,
and finally these were subdued by the Samnites4 • The Oscans
Strabo considers as extinct, and accounts the Sidicines a branch of

198 Strabo v. p. 250 b. 99 Fest. Epit. v. Ausoniam. •

200 'O?T1i<ol, 'tnv t?TuvuµEe1.v "Aucrov" 1tll.H9in6'. Polit. vu. 10.
1 Strabo v. p. 242. c. 'Anloxoc <p•crl 'tHr X,oipct.r Tct.U't•r 'O?T11tou&
oix.'Mut.tt, -roUTou, cf'& xt.tl "AurTOVt:tl' xr.o.. . ti(J'Bt1.1.
2 Strabo proceeding in the passage just cited: Iloll.u{fac J' eµ<pe1.iru Juo
~9r> voµftfJ/Jv 'tct.u'tct.. 'Om11.ouc -yef.p <p•cr1 11.ct.l "Avcrovct.c olxeir 'tHP X,oipctv
'l"ctU'THV ?T1pl 'T"OV Kpct'l">ip<t.
3 v. p. 232. d. p. 233. a.
4 Strabo, v. p, 242. c, goes on thus: "All.ll.01 J~ ll.e-youcrt1, oixour<T".. r
'O?TJX.tllV 'll"p6Tepov, xctl 'Au0"6V•V oi I' iuc.elvouc (trUv ix1Ivo1,), x«ircia-x_iir iJO"'Ttpo•
·oo-xr.or 'l'I ~9voc, 'ttoU.,.ouc I' ,;71'o Kuµr:1.f0Jv, Ex,fvi;uc J' ii7Z'O iufP>1V(A}V f1t~,a-1iv­
('TOU'Tou, JI Kot?TUH<) ?Tctpot ;t ~p>icrct1 J:otrvf'Ta ".
 HISTORY OF ROME. 51

them 205 : so that he seems to apply that name, as far as he has any
clear view touching the matter,. to those Ausonians who continued
unmixed with the Samnites. He may have been led to do so, from
finding the Samnites and other Sabellians called Opicans by Greek
authors 6 • It might seem to this able writer convenient to get rid
of an ambiguity by borrowing the Latin form, giving it a definite
meaning, and allowing the Greek form to preserve that which had
crept into it. For surely he rnn scarcely have been ignorant that
Opicus, Opscus, and Oscus, are, the same name, as is expressly re­
marked by Roman grammarians 7 : the first form was the only one
adopted by the Greeks, and the last became the prevalent one in
Latin. It is true he ought then to have called the people who
dwelt in Samnium before the Sabellians, the Oscans, not the Opi­
cans8: but this is a piece of forgetfulness that even the most accu­
rate may fall into. ·
The name of Opicans was associated by the Gre'eks, from its
being borne by their ferocious mercenaries, with the notion of
barbarians. Even the Romans, as the kinsmen of the l\'Iamertines,
were designated by them with this name of dishonour, and that too
so late as in the time of Cato:· ;i.lthough they were zealous, when
seeking for favour or protection, to maintain that the Samnites were
sprung from the Lacedemonians, the ,Romans from the Arcadians.
But if those Opicans who were driven out by the Samnites, were
Oscans, it is singular at the least that the language of the conquerors
and of the tribes that issued from them, is called Oscan°. · How­
ever supposing the Oscans who remained in their country, to have
far outnumbered their conquerors, theirs might become the prevail­
ing language, in .a mixed, if not in a pure state; even if they were
205 v. p. 237. c. "Oer1<01, K<Lf<'71'<ivoor rnvo, 01'Alh0l7l'O'' and P· 233. a. 'TOOV
"ocrxt»v fxi\o.,011T6Trm1. "'
6 After the authority of the younger Dionysius was subverted, the
whole island was in danger of falling into the power of the Phenicians or of
the Opicans. Epist. Plat. vrn. p. 353. d. · These Opicans can be no other
than. the Sabellian mercenaries, who somewhat later were called Mamertines
and Campanians: the military forces of the Greek states in Sicily consisted
chiefly of these troops.
7 Festus .v. Oscum. In omnibus fere antiquis commentariis scribitur
Opiens pro Osco.
p.
8 v. 250. b. ;, 'f~ 'Toor ·o,,.,,.,,,,_9,.,.g,.,_6nte i1<alvov,.
9 Livy x. 20. To spy out the movements ,of the Samnite army, men
gnari OscOJ linguOJ are sent. To bring proof that the language of the Cam­
panians was Oscan, would be superfluous: the Oscan spoken by the Bruttians
(Fest. Epit. v. bilingues Brutates) can have come to them only from the Sa.­
bellians.
52 HISTORY OF ROME.

a race entirely different from the Sabellians in stock and •speech:

thus the Italian was very soon adopted by the descendants of the
Lombard><: history for centuries speaks only 'of the Lombards in
Italy, though they were merely a small part of the population; but
we never hear of a Lombard language. That a mixture had taken
place, is expressly asserted by Varro, at the very time he is speak­
ing of the languages as completely distinct210 : he .however is not a
witness whose words will justify us in concluding that there was
no affinity between the two 11 •
The Oscan was spread over the whole south ofltaly, even down
to Bruttium and Messapia; the country of Ennius, who spoke both
Oscan and Greek as his mother-tongues. Its dialects must have
differed greatly; since those who spoke it, were partly the old Au­
sonians, partly nations in whom not only the. Sabellians but the
Oenotrians also were grafted on the Oscan stock: and such dialects
must be exhibited by the inscriptions in this language which have
been preserved in various parts.
The Oscau language however is by no means an inexplicable
mystery lik.e the Etruscan: had but one single book in it been pre­
served, we should be perfectly able to decipher it out of itself. Of
the inscriptions, some may be made out word for word, others in
part at least, with complete certainty, and without any violence.
We discover therein that other element which is mixed ,up with the
Greek part of the Latin language; and the forms are such as in
Latin have lost some of their syllables and their terminations, after
the custom of languages when they intermix and grow old: gram­
matical forms too and inflexions are common, which in Latin ap­
pear but rarely and as exceptions. Since this language is not
unintelligible to us, it is not surprising that dramas in it were per­
fectly intelligible to the Romans; nothing but a little practice was
requisite 12•
I now return to the Ausonians, whom on the testimony of Antio­
chus we must consider as a branch of the Oscan nation. Their.
name has a sound which is quite foreign to Italy, and which it ac­
210 Sabina usque radices in Oscam linguam egit: De L. L. v1. 3. p. 86.
11 . Hirpus meant a wolf in the Samnite (Festus v. Irpini); and so it did
in the lEquian. Pliny v11. 2; Solinus p. 11. b. comp. note 231.
12 In investigations so multifarious and extensive as this history requires,
it is cheering to find persons qualified for doing so ready to relieve us by car­
rying on some of those which do not immediately concern the main object of
the work. I am very glad to forego the intention I before. announced, of
giving a view of the Oscan language from its remains, since that task hall
been undertaken by Professor KlenzE'. ·
 HISTORY OF ROME. 53

quired in the mouth of the Greeks. The native form must have
been /luruni; for from this, it is plain, is /lurunci 218 derived; and
we do n"ot in truth require the opinion of Dion Cassius and Servius,
to establish that the Ausonians and Aurunci:ms were one people14•
The district inhabited by the latter was that mentioned by Livy as
the seat of the last Ausonians: their town of Cales' was taken in
419, and three others belonging to them on the lower Liris were
destroyed in 440 in an unprovoked war of extermination*. Livy's
calling them Ausonians in these passages, and not Auruncians, may
be explained thus: it is almost certain that in this part he had the
books of Dionysius before him, and he copied from them without.
consideration: hence too about the same period he has been led to
talk of the Messapianst, when according to Latin usage he should
have called them the Sallentines.
Among the cities of the Auruncians Suessa is known to us ; it
lay in the very heart of the country possessed by the Ausonians. As
to the mention made of them long before, soon after the expulsion
of the Tarquins, it is plain that in the old annals the Volscians
were also called Auruncians, and that it w'as only the later historians
who fancied they were two different nations 15 •
This agrees with our finding Scylax including the inhabitants of
the whole coast for a day's journey to the south of Circeii 16, that is,
as far as the Vulturnus, where in history'we meet with Volscians,
Ausonians and Auruncians, under the name of the first. For Olsi,
as it stands in the Periplus 17 , is no error of the transcriber; it is
Volsi, dropping the digamma; hence Volsici was derived, and then
contracted into Volsci. The Volscentes or Volcentes, a people of
whom we know nothing else, but who make their appearance along
with the Lucanians 18 , are probably the same nation; that is, ancient
Opicans driven southward by the Sabellian immigration, but who

213 .!luruncus is .!lurunicus: see below note 244.

14 Dion Cassius fr. IV. p. 4, ed. Reim. Servius on lEn. vn. 7Z7. Fes­
tus, v. Ausoniam, calls the mythical hero, Auson, the founder of Suessa. Au­
runca: tha.t is to say, the Auruncia.ns were Ausonia.ns.
* VIII. 16. IX. 25. f VIII. 24.
15 The war in which Pometia. and Cora. suffered such terrible punish­
ment for their revolt, is told by Livy twice over; under the year 251 of the
Auruncia.ns, and of the Volscia.ns under the year 259. 'Apj<upourrxfJl>v, in
Strabo v. p. 231. a, in the list of the ancient inhabitants of La.tium, is an error
of the copiers for 'Aupo6p...v. ·
16 Which he states at 500 stadia, p. 30: unless~ ought to be changed
into{. ·
17 '0110-ol. PeripL 3. 18 Livy xxvn. 15.
 54 HISTORY OF ROME.
had maintained their independence among the Lucanians : their
name is a remarkable instance of the almost endless variations to
which those of the Italians are subject~ 19 • Thus came the form
Volusci, which the Greeks took to designate the Volscians :. and I
have no doubt that the Elisyci or Helisyci, mentioned by Herodotus
as one of the tribes among which the Carthaginians levied their
army to attack Sicily in the time of Gelon 20 , are no other peopl~
than the Volscians. Hecatams indeed had called the Helisyci a
Ligurian tribe 21 ; but this can only be taken in a very vague sense;
thus, as Dionysius says, by some Greeks the Romans, and by Phi­
listus the Sicelians, were ranked among the Ligurians ; for in He­
rodotus the Helisyci are named, like the Iberians and Celts, along­
side of the Ligurians. , ,

219 It is a peculiarity of the Latin language, that the simple form of the
name of a nation, which often seems to have been one with the name of its
tipX,•)'h"'• gives rise to derivatives, and these again by composition or con­
traction to new ones, which arc all used without any additional meaning in
the same sense as the simple one. The latter seldom continued current, and
in the case of no one people do we meet with all the derivative forms: but by
collecting the different ones that occur we may obtain a complete view of
their analogy. The simple forms were .!Equus, Volsus, !talus, Umber. The
first class of derivatives end in icus (sicus is shortened into scus), ulus, anus
or inus and unus: Hernicus,· Opicus, Italicus, 'Oµ{dp1"0', Grmcus instead of
Graicus-Volscus, Tuscus, Etruscus-Siculus, Jlpulus,.,. AJ&AO¢, Rutulus, Romu­
lus as a national name,Poenulus-Romanus, Lucanus, Campanus, 'Alx<tvoc, Sabi­
nus, Latinus, Aurunus. The compound inflexions end in iculus: JEquiculus,
Volsculus, Poediculus, Saticulus, Grmculus :-Sabdlus comes fromSabulus, like
ocellus from oculus :-in icinus: Sidicinus :-in unicus·: Auruncus. Tuscanicus
is at least used as an adjective. The termirtations anus, inus, enus, are con­
tracted into ans, ins, ens, or as, is, es, and then follow the inflexions of the
third declension: from Romanus, comes Romas, from Lucanus Lucas, (the
genitive plurals Romanom and Lucanom are found on coins, and the elephant
was called bos Lucas) from Cmnpanus Campas (Plautus Trinum. u. 4. 143.) 1
from Bruttanus Bruttas, from Picenus Picens. Samnis in the same way
comes from Samninus,-which is derived from Samnium,-like Antias, and
like Tiburs from Tiburnus. Ulus in these adjectives is never a diminutive
syllable, no more so in Grmculus than in Hispallus, from Ilispanulus: that
secondary meaning was not affixed to it till late. Now as no change was
made in the name by these terminations, the Siculi in Latium might also be
'called Sicani: a form which must unquestionably have been found by Virgil,
and which he made use of with a view of restricting the other name to the
islanders. To the class of terminations in as belongs IT<t1'iH'l'9' (Dionysius 1.
12); and even "E"""' from ~'"""~· The form of proper names in MC with the
lengthened genitive in •noc is ascribed by Herodian to the ancient language
of the Sicilians: Bekher Anecdot. p. 1390: this would give l'l'et.1'1Mv'l'~C, like
.!lntiatis, Bnuatis, Samnitis.
20 vu. 165. 21 Stephan. Byz. v. 'E"'"r/"01.
 IllSTURY OF Hoi\m. 55

The language of the Volscians is spoken of as distinct from the

Oscan 222 ; that is, from the dialect so called in the districts under the
Sabellians; and the language on the plate in which the name of
Velitrre seems to occur, is different from that on other monuments :
but the origin of that plate is far too uncertain, for us to pronounce
with positiveness that the inscription is V olsci&.n.
Bordering on the Auruncians of Cales, and of the same race, we
find the Sidicines of Teanum, whom Strabo expressly calls Os­
cans23, and somewhat further the Saticulians on the Vulturnus 94•
Both names are forms derived from the simpler ones Sidici and
Satici, which, having thus traced them back, we perceive to be
cognate words.
The V olscians in Roman story are almost insrparable from the
.lEquians 25 , who are described as a very ancient people, great and
formidable to Rome 26 : they were mountaineers hardened by the
chace, used to make predatory incursions on their neighbours 27 •
When their power was at its highest their territory extended as far
as mount Algidus, between Tusculum, Velitrre, and the towns of
the Hernicans; and as far as the Fucine lake: the fortress on that
lake taken by the Romans in the year 347, which is called a Vol­
scian one 28 , must undoubtedly have belonged tQ the .lEquians.
The Faliscans too by mount Soracte, in whose name that of the
Volscians is clearly dis.cernible, were 1Equians 29 • The Ausonians
however did not make up the whole population of Falerii and .its
subject towns: it was by the descendants of the Pelasgians that the
worship of the Argive Juno with her peculiar rites was preserved
there 30 , although it may perhaps have been completely' adopted by
the conquerors. A word from the Faliscan dialect is preserved,
and this word it had in common with the Samnite 31 •

222 By the comic poet Titinius in Festus v. Oscum; Osce et Volsce fabu­
lantur, nam Latine nesciunt.
23 v. p. 237. c.
24 Virgil .lEneid. vu. 729. Saticulus asper. In history we hear only of
their town Saticulum.
25 The by..forms .JEquanus and .JEquulus are preserved in the Greek
'A111.uo' and "A '"AO': of .!Equiculus we find instances in Latin. .JEquicula, as
a masculine nominative, is an erroneous form, and ought to be expunged
from the dictionaries: in Virg. vu. 747, .!Equicula agrees with gms. No less
erroneous is the form .JEq11,icola.
26 Livy I.·37. Cicero de Rep. 11. 20. Magnam gentem et ferocem et
rebus populi Romani imminentem.
27 Virg. .lEn. VII. 747-749. 28 Livy 1v. 57.
29 lEquosque Faliscos, Virgil vu. 695, and Servius.
30 Dionysius 1. 21. . 31 Hiryms; sf'e abovP, n. 211.
56 llISTORY OF ROME.

In such words as the Oscan shares with the Latin, we often find
p substituted for qu; pid for quid, and the like : hence it may be
regarded as certain that the name .!Equi contains the radical syllable
of the names Opici and .flpuli, according to the Latin way of ex:
pressing it. For the Apulians properly so called were Opicans,
whose name, after their conquest of the Daunians, passed to the
country they occupied.
For, after the manner of all national migrations, the Opicans in
the whole country between the Tiber and the Adriatic, being them­
selves pressed forward by the Sabellians; threw themselves upon the
Italians, who throughout this whole extent were their neighbours,
and overpowered them. Many of these submitted; others left their
homes: and thus in the oldest traditions of the Italian Greeks it was
related that the Sicelians who crossed over to the island, had been
driven from their abodes by the Opicans 93 ~. Here again the Sice­
lians are the same people with the Italians; and it was only from
the Sicelians on the Tiber being known to be still extant, that the
notion originated which ascribed this migration to them. This
remotest branch of the nation is the very one with regard to which
it is the most improbable that they took part, at least in any con­
siderable numbers, in such an expedition. Rather must it have
come out of Campani:i, of which it is no less certain that in earlier
times it was peopled by the Pelasgians, than that afterward it be­
came so entirely Oscan, as to show the previous population must
have abandoned it.
It was an opinion univ!lrsii.lly received in the age of Augustus,
that Campania, until it was conquered by the Samnites, had been
subject to the Etruscans; and that Capua under the name of Vul­
turnum was the earliest city, and Nola one founded somewhat later,
in this southern Etruria33• Now I think I have shown that the Tyr­
rhenians from Surrentum to the Silarus were certainly not Etrus­
cans; and here again it may be that whatever was found by Roman
writers in Neapolitan or Cuman chroniCles about Tyrrhenians who
had of yore been in possession of Campania, was referred by them
to the Etruscans. In fact that Capua, as well as Rome, passed with
the earlier Greeks for a Pelasgo-Tyrrhenian city, may be inferred
from Cephalon, who mentions it together with Rome among the
cities built by the Trojans: and the same notion lies at the bottom
of those representations, the traces of which are preserved by the

232 Dionysius I. 22.

33 Livy 1v. 37. Velleius 1. 7. Strabo v. p. 242. d.

 HISTORY OF ROl\IE. 57

grammarians, when they tell us in one place that Capua was

founded by Campus; in another that a prince of this name had
ruled in Epirus, over the Chaonians, and that Epirus had also borne
the name of Campania 234 • Again by means of an emendation as to
which no doubt can be entertained, we are supplied with an express
testimony for Nola being of Tyrrhenian origin 35 : the statement too
of the anonymous chronologers referred to by V elleius, that Capua
and Nola were built by the Tuscans about eight and forty years
before Uome, can only be defended by interpreting it of the Tyr­
rhenians. And in spite of the express reference to Cato, it is ex­
tremely doubtful whether a distinction was not made by him between
the Tuscans and the Etruscans. Polybius however speaks in so
many words of the Etruscans as the possessors of the Phlegrman
plains 36 : and slight as his authority is in such matters, I would not
reject an opinion in favour of which he declares himself so posi­
tively, until every attempt to maintain it has been found futile.
Cato's statement, which is so displeasing to that ingenious but hasty
writer, Velleius, that Capua had existed only 260 years before its
taking in the second Punic war, and accordingly was founded about
the year 283, seems to,admit of being very well reconciled with
what can· be collected of Etruscan history. The greatness of the
Etruscans belongs to the third century of Rome: it displays itself
in the wars of Porsenna against Rome and Aricia: in the Veientine
war after the disaster on the Cremera, in 276; and it was about
the same time, 01. 76. 3. 278, that Cuma was saved by Iliero from
the Etruscan fleet. But· the subjugation of Rome to Porsenna
seems to have been of brief duration ; and soon after the middle of
the third century the Roman history becomes so determinate, that
we know the people on the left bank of the Tiber cannot have been
in such a state of dependence as must be presupposed before Etruria

234 Etymolog. l\fagn. v. Kd.p.7roc. Servius on l"En. m. 334. The Cam­

py lids, the house of king Campus, must assuredly have been the d.p:x_1,.iv
}EV•c among the Chaonians, mentioned in Thucydides, u. 80. In the line of
Virgil the old commentators were no doubt right in interpreting Chaonii
Campi not the Chaonian fields but the Chaonian Campi. It was no over­
refinement that determined them: a Roman who had voyaged from Brundu­
sium to Greece, had seen Chaonia with its Acroceraunia, and could no more
write about Chaonian plains, than an Englishman about Alps between Calais
and Paris.
35 The text of Solinus, p. 10. d, has Nol~ a Tyriis. I read with Lipsius,
though il'l a different sense, a Tyrrlienis: a Thuriis, which Salmasius conjec­
tures, is certainly wrong.
36 II. 17.
J.-H
liB HISTORY OF ROME.

could send out colonies beyond the Vulturnus. Nor are there less
difficulties against their having crossed the sea; since the three har­
bours on the Phlegrrean plains, Cuma, Dicrearchia, and Parthenope,
had continued invariably in the hands of the Chalcidian Greeks:
and without possessing one at least of these, the Etruscans, even
if they had landed at Liternum, could never have thought of form·
ing a permanent settlement.
In Dionysius we find it recorded how Cuma was besieged by an
enormous host composed of Tyrrheni:ms from the Ionian sea, to­
gether with U mbrians, Daunians, and many other barbarians.
This war is not to be rejected on account of the fabulous exaggera­
tion in the numbers, any more than the expedition of Xerxes: and
the prodigy of the rivers flowing' backward, is only a proof that the
fearful exigency through which the Cumans were carried by the
aid of the gods, was transmitted in song through the mouths of
their children and grandchildren. Even the chronological state­
ment which dates this war in the 64th Olympiad, that is, about
228, may be deemed correct on the whole, though it may go a few
years too far back: indeed to adjust the native chronological regis­
ters with perfect accuracy to the years of the Athenian archons was
not a feasible matter. One is naturally disposed to conceive that
the settlement of the Etruscans at Capua was contemporaneous
with this expedition: an earlier date is incompatible with that story
itself, which expressly represents the Cumans as in possession of
the Campanian plains 237 • And I believe that there was a connexion
between these events; but here again that the Tyrrhenians were
not Etruscans. Those nations who are said to have marched
against Cuma, must unquestionably, it seems to me, have been the
Italians and Opicans thrust for~vard by the advance of the Sabel­
lians; and moving onward in one mass, in which the drivers were
mixed up with the fugitives, as in the great migration of the Ger­
mans and Huns. Now this appears to be the epoch at which the
Opicans settled in the Phlegrrean plains: and years enough may
have elapsed after this, before they became masters of Capua, to
allow of this city reckoning her origin according to the era men­
tioned by Cato., The statement that in this country, as in Etruria,
there were twelve Tuscan cities, rests only on Strabo, who delivers
it without confidence'"; and it is extremely doubtful. Not the
f'lightest trace of the Etruscans is to be found in Campania. ,The
letters it is true might be deceptive; but all the written monuments

237 Dionysius vn. 3. * v. p. 242. d.

 IIISTORY OF ROME. 59

without exception are in Oscan. Nor are the works of art less re­
mote from every thing Etruscan.
Nola is called a Chalcidian city 238 : probably the Tyrrhenians,
with a view to strengthen themselves, admitted Greeks to fellow­
citizenship, and these N olans maintained their ground against the
Oscans. They were subsequently attached to the Samnites, who
everywhere appear on friendly terms with the Greeks. How en­
tirely the civilization of Greece had been adopted by Nola, is
evinced by the workmanship and language on her coins: but from
being situate in the midst of the Oscans, whom even N eapolis was
not able to exclude from the rights of citizenship, she had already
lost her character in the second Punic war, and become substan­
tially an Oscan city; and we may find what to us is a melancholy
parallel to her fate, in that which is impending over the German
towns on foreign coasts.

238 By Justin xx. 1: that is, by Trogus. Also by Silius xu. 161: and
Silius lived among the Neapolitans.
 THE ABORIGINES AND LATINS.

THERE was a tradition, of the class most deserving of credit, that

in very early times a people, who dwelt about mount Velino and
the lake of Celano as far as Carseoli and Reati, had been driven
from thence by the Sabines who came from Aquila. Such was
Cato's. account239 : and if Varro, who enumerated the towns they
had possessed in those parts 40 , was not imposed upon, not only were
the sites of those towns distinctly preserved, as well as their
names 4 1, but other information also concerning them, such as can­
not be transmitted through so many centuries by any thing but
wntmgs. Their capital, Lista, was taken by surprise; and the ex­
peditions they sent out during many years from Reate to recover
it; proved fruitless. Withdrawing from that district, they came
down the Anio; and at Tibur, Antemnoo, Ficulea, Tellena4 ~, and
further on at Crustumerium and Aricia, they found the Siculians ;
and subdued or expelled them in a number of places. That Proo­
neste too was a town of the Siculians, seems to be implied in the
statement, that it once bore the Greek name of Stephane43 • The
name of Tusculum shows that it belonged to the same people, since
Tusci and Turini can only be different forms of one word 44 :
moreover the ruling house there designated itself to be Italian and
I

239 Dionysius 11. 49. 40 Dionysius 1. 14.

41 The greater part seem not to have been destroyed till the JEquian war
about 450. Of the traces seen by Varro we may form a clear notion from the
. quadrangular substructions in the district of Tibur, beyond the river, a couple
of miles to the west of the city, which mark the sites of some of. the little
towns subject to Tibur.
42 Dionysius 1. 16. 43 Pliny IIJ. 9.
44 See note 219. In Tuscus, as in all similar names, sicus has been con­
tracted into scus; and Tusicus is Turicus: for r and s in the old Latin are
perpetually interchanged, as in Furius derived from Fusus, and .!lunmcus
which on the other hand stands for .!lusunicus.
 HISTORY OF IWME. 61

Tyrrhenian by its surnames, and traced its descent from Circe. that
is. from Circeii 245 • Fidenm too was a Tuscan town.
These conquerors in the Latin legends were called Sacrani 46 :
either because it was related from the very first that they had len
their homes to fulfil the vow of a sacred spring; or it was a heredi­
tary name, the apparent meaning of which led to the invention of
such a story. Another name. and unquestionably an old anu
genuine one, was Casci•7: which afterward cam~ to be used as an
adjective, in the sense in which Gothic and altfriinkisch are now
used. That however in addition to this they were properly called.
Prisci, a word the meaning of which underwent the same fate, will
be shown when I reach the history of Rome*.
The predominant legend, which makes the Trojan followers of
JEneas and the native subjects of Latinus assume the new and com­
mon name of Latins, retains traces of the tradition that this people
was formed by the intermixture of different tribes. Still more
clearly is this attested by the name Prisci Latini. in its genuine
signification of Prisci and Latinit: this however itself shows that
the name of the Latins is older than the conquest by the Priscans,
and consequently belonged to the Siculians of these parts. Still
the advantage of having a clear distinctive name is enough to justify
my following that legend and the usage it gave birth to, and giving
the name of Latins to the nation which arose out of that conquest,
and that of Aborigines to the earlier inhabitants of Latium.
This name is said to mean ancestors 48 : but it i~ surely simpler to
interpret it of those who were the inhabitants of the country from
the beginning, answering to the Greek .fl.utochthones. 'Vhat kept
this from being admitted, seems to have been, that the Umbrians
were supposed by some, perhaps for no other reason than that
they were called the most ancient people in Italy. to have been
driven by the Aborigines out of Latium; while others ascribed this

245 The Mamilii, Vituli and Turini. See above p. 12. Ulyxes may have
belonged to the legend in very early times, even granting that the name of
Telegonus, as the founder. of Tusculum, was foisted in out of the poets.
46 Servius on .l:En. vn. 796. on the words et Sacraru:e acics-compared
with Diod. 1. 16. See below note 279. '
47 Saufeius in Servius on'. .l:En. 1. 6. qui-Cassei (read Casci) vocati sunt,
quos posteri Aborigines nominaverunt. Ennius has Casci populi Latini:
compare the other passages in Columna.'s note p. 14.
* See note 914, and the text to it. t See notes 752, and 915. .
48 Dionysius, 1. IO, explains it by ,_av1'p;>:.tt1: compare Saufeius in Ser­
vius on .l:En. 1. 6. quoniam aliis (read ab illis se) ortos esse recognoscebant.
The nominative singular, after tJ1e analogy of the old languagP, was probably
_'Jboriginu.s.
 62 IllSTORY OF ROME.

expulsion to the Sacrani; others again, influenced partly by the

Greek tales about the rovings of the Pelasgians, took the Aborigines
for a conflux of wandering tribes, and supposed their name to be a
corruption of .!Jberrigines. ·
It might seem as if this name, being snch an abstract designation,
had been an invention of the later Roman historians: but, though
manifestly it never was the real name of any people, it is yet far
older than the time when the history of Rome began to grow out
of the wrappers of scantly-worded chronicles. For so early as
about 470 Callias, the historian of Agathocles, spoke of Latinus
king of the Aborigines 249 : and in Lycophron, all whose information
about Rome was derived from Timreus and other Greek writers,
Cassandra predicts that lEneas will build thirty castles in the land
of the Borigoni50 •
The inconsistency that prevails in giving the name of Aborigines
not only to the Tyrrhenians but to the invaders also, is in the char­
acter of legendary history : but it is clear that the latter cannot have
obtained the name of Autochthona except by an abuse of language.
Cato, who wrote that the chief part of the plain in the country of
the Volscians had formerly belonged to the Aborigines 51, evidently
·marks them out thereby as the inhabitants of the Maremma: for
in the interior of the Volscian country there are no plains. Nor is
it less unquestionably to Pelasgians that he and C. Sempronius must
have applied this name; since they pronounced the Aborigines to be
Achreans 5 ~. So ltlat Dionysius must be under a misunderstanding,
when he represents what Cato had related concerning the spreading
of the Sabines, as if he had called the pe~ple whom they drove
before them, the Aboriginess 3 , Varro indeed has palpably been
guilty of this error, and perhaps also preceded Dionysius even in
representing the Pelasgians as the allies of the Aborigines, who join
them in driving out the Sicelians; after which however the Pelas­
gians are made to withdraw and disperse.
But the Sicelians are very far from disappearing out of Latium ~
nay many of their places seem to have maintained their freedom,
in the neighbourhood of the Tiber, and round about Rome. Indeed
the change produced in the population of a country by national
migrations is seldom entire, unless the conquerors are exterminating
savages : in other cases the lovers of freedom leave their homes ;
but a part, and commonly the majority, submit to the victor. Such
was the case then also: in the places that were subdued, a part
249 Dionysius 1. 72. 50 v.1253.
51 Fragm. Origg. I. in Priscian v. p. 608.
52 Dion ysi us 1. 11. 53 Above note 239.
 HISTORY OF ROl\IE. 63

united with the Cascans; another quitted the country: and this was
connected with the legends touching the expeditions of the Sicelians
across the sea to Trinacria, and of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians to
Greece.
According to the traditions of the Italian Greeks, the people by
whom the Sicelians were driven over' into Sicily, were the Opi­
cans254. Now it certainly is extremely questionable whether this
migration be more authentic than other pretended traditions of the
same kind; or not rather, like them, a mere inference and presump­
tion: and as the name of Sicelians was common to all the Italians, it
is, to say the least, highly improbable, that the tribe which went
over to Sicily, should have been the one which dwelt the furthest
off: still the evident affinity between that clement of the I.atin lan­
guage which is not Greek, and the Oscan, puts it beyond a doubt
that the Cascans belonged to the Oscan stock. The Oscan words
that appear in Latin are contracted and curtailed, as the Zend words
are in Persian; and such must always be the case, when a difficult
and harsh language abounding in polysyllables is adopted by a na­
tion whose tongue has a different character. Now since the Um­
brians during their early greatness reached as far as those most ancient
seats of the Cascans, we may further regard the tradition followed
by Philistus, that the Sicelians had been expelle<l by the U mbrians and
Pelasgi:ms, as one and the same with that which le<l Thucydides to
write that it was by the Opicans and Oenotrians: so that the Um­
brians and Opicans, whose names come so near each other, would
be branches of the same nation 55,
The Aborigines are pourtrayed by Sallust and Virgil as hordes of
savages, without manners, without laws, without agriculture, living
on the pro<luce of the chase and on wild fruits. This probably is
nothing else than an ancient speculation about the progress of rnan­
kin<l from animal rudeness to civilization; after the manner of those
philosophical histories, as they were called, which were repeated
even to surfeiting <luring the latter half of the last century, more so
however in other countries than in Germany, and in which even
the state of brute speechlessness was not forgotten. The pages of
these observing philosophers swarm with quotations from books of
travels: this however they have overlooked, that not a single in­
stance can be shown of a really savage people passing spontaneously

254 Thucydides VI. 2. Antiochus in Dionysius 1. 22.

55 Dionysius 1. 22. Both the historians, in regarding the Sicelians as
distinct from and as driven out by the Oenotrians and Pelasgians, made the
same mistake which occurred in the legend about Cyzicus, Note 69: com­
pare note 114 and p, 50.
 64 HISTORY OF ROME.

into civilization, and that, where it has been forced upon them from
without, the physical decay of the race has ensued; as in the case
of the Natticks, the Guaranis, the missions in New California, and
those at the Cape. For every race of men has received its des­
tination assigned to it by God, with the character which is suited to
it and stamps it: the social state too, as Aristotle wisely says, is
prior to the individual who is called to it*; the whole prior to the
part: those. speculators do not perceive that the savage has either
<legenerated, or was but half human from the first. The account of
the Aborigines however may also have been a tradition of the serfs
conccr~ing the rude character of their lords, who lay on their bear­
skin couch, and for whom they were forced to till the ground. It
cannot be mere chance, that the words for a house, a field, a plough,
ploughing, wine, oil, milk, kine, swine, sheep, apples, and others
relating to agriculture and gentler ways of life, should agree in Latin
and Greek 256 ; while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to
war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek. If the agreem~nt
in the former class does not run throughout, this was to be expected
in languages which, like the Hellenic and Pelasgic, notwithstanding
their complete affinity, are, perhaps for the greater part, essentially
distinct.
,Janus is said to have been venerated by the Aborigines as the
founder of a better way of life; together with Saturn, who taught
them husbandry and induced them to settle in fixed habitations.
Janus or Dianus, as Scaliger has shown, is the god of the suns7;
Saturn and his wife Ops ar.e most probably the god and goddess of
the earth, the power of the earth which vivifies, and that which
conceives and brings forth: its depths are his kingdom. The inter­
pretation which turns these gods into kings, is a more modern one.
Between Saturn and the Trojan settlement there were only three
kings of the Aborigines in the legend; Picus, Faunus, and Latinus,
son after son; who, when removed from the earth, were raised to
the rank of gods, and adored as lndigetes. It is only in a very late
account that Latinus falls in the battle with Turnus or Mezentius:
in the genuine legend he disappeared, and was worshipped as J upi­
ter Latialis 58 •
* Polit. 1. 1. npo,,.1pov J~ ,,.;; <1>uuai .,,.6;o,.ic ~ olx.l<L x.,.l 1..,.,,.,,.,, 1l1u»v 9,,.,,.,_
256 Several words might have been added, had not their identity required
a detailed proof: for instance equus is l71'71'•'·
57 Hence he may help us to explain the story of. Circe, who in Greek
mythology is the daughter of the Sun: that story was without doubt indi­
genous in the neighbourhood of the mountain named after her and not an
importation from Greece. '
58 Festus v. Oseillum. Compare Schol. J\!Pdiol. ad or. pro. Plane. !J.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 65
Latinus in a different dialect was called Lavinus; whence igno­
rant expounders have given him a brother, the founder of Lavi­
nium259. So the' Latins were likewise called Lavicans 60 , and Lavi­
nium was the seat of their common sanctuary and of their national
assembly, like the Panionium 61 , King Lacinius too in Oenotriae~
is another phase of Latinus; and here we plainly see that the Oeno­
trians were also c·alled I,acinians, and belonged to the same nation
with, the Latins. For Lacinium too with its temple of Juno was a
common sanctuary of those tribes, of great antiquity and indigenous
'origin: as is denoted by the expression, that it was founded before
the Trojan war63 : and the name of the Lacinian promontory came
from the people who dwelt by it, like that of the lapygian on the
opposite coast. Nay this Lacinius is expressly called Latinus,
king of the Italians, and marries his daughter, J,aurina, to a foreigner
named Lo<'.rus 64 • 'Vhat historian however can feel any interest in
tracing the fantastic shapes assumed by the clouds of mythology, as
they vary at the whim of capricious narrators? Who would tarry
among such things, when investigations of great importance are
awaiting him? Still I cannot omit remarking, what throws so much
light on the notions of 'the Greeks touching the nature of the Latin
nation, that Latinus, whom Hesiod calls sovereign of all the re­
nowned Tyrrhenians, that is, those of the Pelasgian race 65 , is ac­
cording to him the son of Ulysses and Circe; while another story­
in which Telemachus and Penelope fly to Latium with the guiltless
murderer Telegonus, to avoid the impending vengeance of the suitors
after the death of Ulysses-makes him the son of Circe and Tele­
machus60. In a different class of legends Hercules is his father, and
a daughter of Faunus 67, or the Hyperborean Palanto, his mother68 • _
There was an obscure conception that Rome itself was in the neigh­

25!) Servius on lEn. 1. 2.

60 Picti scuta Lavici (not Labici), JEn. vn. 7!J6, are a people, not the
town near the Via Latina.
61 This is the way we are to explain Lavinia littora, anJa: lEn. I. 2. 1v.
236; and not by a prolepsis. The name of the Latins is made by Virgil to
originate, as it was supposed to have done, from the union of the Trojans with
the Aborigines: the meaning of the other form had not become equally fixed.
62 Servius on JEn. 111. 552. Diodorus 1v. 24.

63 Servius on lEn. 111. 552. quod ante Troicum bcllnm collatitia pecunia.

reges populique fecerunt.

64 Conon narr. 3. 65 Theogon. 1011-15-.

66 Hyginus Fab. 127, and one Galitas in Festus v. Roma.

67 Justin XLIII. 1.

68 Dionysius 1. 43, Festus v. Palatium.

1.-1
 IIISTORY OF RO.ME.

bourhood of the Hyperboreans 209; and the llyperborean TarkynreF 0

seem to be no other than the people of Tarqui11ii. Now if we are
not afraid of looking for the mysterious Hyperboreans in Italy, we
here· see how the gifts they sent to Delos might be handed round
the Adriatic from people to people, until they came to Do<lona; a
custom preserved from those ancient times when the whole coast
of that sea was inhabited by Pelasgian nations: ;nd thus, the reli­
gion being the same, it is no longer extraordinary that offerings
should have been sent from so far. And if it he but allowed that
the people called Hyperboreans may have been a Pelasgian tribe in
Italy, the possibility will perhaps be nearly turned into certainty
when it appears that the title of the carriers is almost a Latin
word 71 •
The voyage of Evander to Latium with a train of Arcadians would
not deserve the slightest notice, being an evident fiction, were it
not homesprung antl ancient, so that it is likely we may find an
explanation to clear it of its absurdity. The slightest tradition is
enough to justify our believing that, there being so many small Sicu­
lian towns scattered around, another such stood on the hill near the
Tiber, where the foundations of the eternal city were one day to be
laid; and that it bore the name Palatium, which reminded the Greeks
of Pallantion in l\fanalia. · Moreover with the Greek genealogers
Arcadian and Pelasgian are equivalent terms. Nor have we any
right to question the statement of Dionysius, that sacrifices were
offered in memory of Evander, as well as of his mother Carmen ta;
and that the native histories related he had introduced a knowledge
of the arts and more civilized ways of life7 2 , and had entertained
Hercules, and given him his daughter Launa in marriage, by whom
the hero became father of Pallas: it is from Pallas however that .the
town and hill now appear first to receive their name ; for no tradition
can be fixed. These tales are demonstrably older than the time of
Polybius: they cannot indeed be of Italian origin in the strictest
sense; but who is capable of measuring the operation of the Pe­
lasgic element in the Latin character, by means whereof the my­
thology and religion, the oracles and prophecies of Greece, gained
an entrance among the Romans, the Latins, and the Etruscans?
and where is there a trace of the ,epic and lyric poets of the Greek

269 Heraclides in Plutarch Camill. c. 22.

70 Stephanus v. T"-p1tovl<t..
71 Il•pq>•pier,-Herod. 1v. 33,-seems.akin to pcrfcrre.
72 The Latin alphabetical characters too, as distinguished from the
Etruscan. Tacitus Ann. x1. 14.
 HISTORY OF JW.\IE. 67

cities on the coasts of Italy, whether more or less remote from l?.ome,
to whom she became of importance long before she excited any
attention in the Ir.other country? It is true, the Grmco-Italian my­
thographers whose names have been preGerved, cannot well be
earlier at the utmost than the first Alexanclrian poets. The epithet
old, applied in the text ofDionysius to the poet Euxenus 273, rests on
a doubtful reacling: Simylus, Butas, Diocles of Peparethus, ancl
Antigonus, (the two latter of whom perhaps wrote on Rome in verse
also) are certainly not of an earlier age. But though the battle
fought by Hercules in Liguria, and his expeclition across the Alps
and through the peninsula, belolig to the old Hellenic IIeracleids;
it must have been by. Greek poets in Italy that his return from
Erythea was embellished with the ad venture of Cacus, the battle
on the Phlegrman fields in Campania against the giants who fled
to Leuternia, and the founding of Herculanum ancl Pompeii: in
like manner the Greeks on the Pontus told of his exploits in Scythia.
I am far from fancying it possible to detect in what way the
worship of the Sabine Semo Sancus was transferred to the son of
Alcmena: nor will I employ myself in conjecturing whether the
Ara Maxima of Hercules existed before the censorship of Appius
Claudius the blind. Still surely the most natural m,ode of explain­
ing the story of the Potitii and Pinarii, is to suppose that the
worship of Hercules was a sacrum gentilitium belonging to those
houses; that the Romans in the Samnite war were commanded by
the Sibylline books, or by the answer of an oracle, such as in the
same war enjoined the erection of statues to the bravest and the
wisest of the Greeks, to adopt the worship of Hercules, among all
the Greek heroes elevated to Olympus the most heroic, and to raise
a statue to him, with a pro;nise of blessings to those who should
consecrate to him the tithe of their substance; nay perhaps this act
was prescribed to all, as a way of bringing the in terminable con test
to a prosperous conclusion. A colossal statue was erected to him
in the year 449, in the same censorship of Appius, who bribed the
Potitii to teach the rites of their worship: this was justly deemed a
base act; and when their house bec~me extinct, not indeed within
a year, much less within thirty days, but in the great pestilence
which desolated Rome ten years after, men looked upon it as a
mark of the finger of God~. It was during this pestilence that the
worship of JEsculapius was introduce<l 74 •

273 The words "Eo,,.o, ti 7ro1~.,.n~ dpx,a.io,, in Dionysius, 1. 34, can hardly
be genuine: at least .¥vnp is wanting after them.
* Livy 1x. 29. Festus v. Potitium. Servius on lEn. vm. 269.
'i4 The den of Cacus is said to have heen in the Avf'ntine; bnt the •tep~
 GS HISTORY OF ROME.

I return to Evander, and remark that he seems to be only another

form of Latinus: this legend makes him the son of the prophetic
Carmen tis, as that does of the prophetic Faunus; and he marries
his daughter Lavinia in the one to Hercules, in the other to .lEneas,
both of them foreign heroes. So in a different legend Latinus takes
the place of Cacus, and steals the oxen'"·
Incomparably more brilliant and celebrated than this legend, is
that of the coming of the Trojans to Latium: but it is immediately
connected with those concerning the building of Rome; and its only
importance would be with regard to the pedigrees of the Roman
houses, even if it could be shown to be historical. JEneas and his
scanty train had not the power of transforming the Latin people.
I therefore sever this investigation from the present subject, and re­
serve it for the preliminary history of Rome.
It was considered in later ages as certain, that the Roman con­
quests were the means by which the frontier of Latium was pushed
forward from Circeii to the Liris 275• But in the first treaty with
Carthage all the· towns on the coast from Ostia to Terracina are
called Latin, and are subject to the Romans; and the Carthaginians
bind themselves, if they take any Latin town not subject· to the
Romans, to deliver it up to them 76 • Conquests in the interior are
out of the question: so that Latium must then have stretched further
along the coast toward Cuma: and the name of Latins is synony­
mous with that of Tyrrhenians.

of Cacus were on the Palatine; Diodorus was acquainted with them (iv. 21.);
and in his story the latter hill is the residence of Cacius, who joins with Pi­
narius in entertaining and paying honour to the Tirynthian hero, and thus
takes the place of Potitius; nay ofEvand.cr: no mention is made of the latter,
nor of any Arcadians; nor of any but natives. A sister of Cacus too, Caca,
like Vesta, had a perpetual fire kPpt up in honour of her. (Servius on .lEn.
vm. 190.) It seems beyond doubt that the whole story of this expedition of
Hercules in Diodorus is borrowed from Timmus: his opening a permanent
and secure road through the barbarous tribes of Liguria reminds us of the
Herculean road in the treatise De Mirabilibus p. 102. a. The account in the
work bearing the name of Victor, de origine P.R. which professes to be taken
from old annalists, is of no value: for that book was written toward the end of
"the fifteenth century, like the pretended writings of Messalla, Fenestella,and
Modestus, or in the sixteenth, by an evident impostor.
* Servius on .lEn. m. 552.
275 Strabo v. p. 231. Pliny m. 9. Scylax had already given it the same
limits.
76 Polybius rn. 22. l(«pxnJ6vm p.ii d.J11tei'l'aJrrav •.. p.nJ' t/:Mov p.~J!y,,_
Aa<riv,,.v ~ ..., iiv ~?Ti/1<001• iav Ji Tm~ µii r» rr1v ~?Tii1too11<. T. 1'., See the text to
7

note 1184.
 ..

THE SABINES AND SABELLIANS.

Tm; Romans had no general name comprehending the Sabines

along with the tribes supposed to have issued from them: the latter,
whether Marsians and Pelignians, or Samnites and Lueanians, they
termed Sabellians. .That these tribes among themselves were
called Savini or Sabini, is certain from the inscription on the Sam­
nite denary coined in the Social war: at least it is certain as to the
Samnites, whose name is in every form manifestly, and in the
Greek :!«uvl-r<t1 immediately, derived from Savini: but the usage of
a people whose writings have perished, like every thing that is
totally extinct in fact, has lost its rights. I shall venture to employ
the term Sabellians for the whole race; since the tribes so named
by the Romans are very far more important than the Sabines; and
it would clearly have offencled a Latin ear, had any one called the
Samnites Sabines: for investigati'ons like those in this history a
general name is inclispensable.
The Sabellians, when Rome advanced beyond the frontiers of
Latium, were the most widely extencled and the greatest people in
Italy: the Etruscans had already fallen, as they had seen the fall
of the nations that flourished before them, the Tyrrhenians, the
Umbrians, and the· Ausonians. As the Dorians were great in their
colonies, while the mother-country contin11ed to be small; and as
it lived in peace, while the tribes it had sent forth were spreacling
themselves abroad by conquests and plantations; thus, says Cato,
was it with the olcl Sabine people. Their original home is placed
by him 277 about Amiternum, in the highest Apennines of the Abruzzi,
where the snow on mount l\Iajella is saicl never to disappear entirely,
and where the mountain pastures are visited in summer by the
Apulian hercls. From hence they issued in very remote times, long
before the Trojan war; and driving the Cascans before them in one

277 Dionysius 1. 14. 11. 49.

70 HISTORY OF ROME.

quarter, the Umbrians in another, took possession of the territory

which has borne their name for three thousand years. As the
population multiplied here and overflowed, it migrated to different
parts. It was an Italian religious usage in times of severe pressure
from war or pestilence, to make a vow of a sacred spring (ver sa­
crum); that is, to consecrate all the creatures born in the next
spring: when twenty years had elapsed 078 , the cattle was sacrificed
. o r redeemed, the youth were sent forth79, A vow of this kind was
made by the Romans in the second year of the second Punic war;
but it extended only to their flocks and herds 80 • Such vows, the
tradition runs, lPd to the sending out of the Sabine colonies: sacred
animals were charged by the gods to w horn any of them was dedi­
cated"\ to guide them on their way. One colony was led by a
woodpecker, the bird of Mamer~, into Picennrn 82 , then peopled by
Pelasgians or Liburnians: another by an ox into the land of the
Opicans; this became the great Samnite people; the Birpinians
were guided by a wolfs 3 • That colonies were sent out from Sam­
nium, we know historically. The 'Frentanians on the Adriatic
were Samnites 84 , who stood apart from the rest of the nation in the
second Roman war: a band of Samnites conquered Campania and
the country as far as the Silarus: another host, calling themselves
Lucanians after their leader Lucius 85 , subdued and gave their name
to Lucania88 •
Capua, then called Vulturnum, origin~lly a Tuscan, and at that
time probably an Oscan town, purchased peace of the Samnites by
receiving a colony of them to share both in her city and territory•7,
This is the origin of the Campanian people, an event memorable to
the Sicilian Greeks:·. these garn the name of Campanians to all the
races mixed up of Sabellians and Oscans, and therefore to the mer­
cenaries who spoke Osean, under whose violence they pined*. It
278 Livy xxxm. 44. Festus v. l\Iamertini.
79 Dionysius 1. 16. Strabo v. p. 2,)0. :i. Festus v. Ver sacrum and l\Ia­
mertini.
80 Livy XX!!. 9.
81 Strabo and Dionysius in the passages last quoted.
82 Strabo v. p. 240. d .. Pliny m. 18.
83 Strabo v. p. 250. b. d.
84 Strabo v. p. 241. b. Scyl:ix, p. 5. Seen. 293.
85 Pliny m. 10. Etymol. l\I. v. Am"tvol. l\Iore probably after an
•p;i:.n,.<Tn' named Lucas.
86 In the epitaph on L. Cornelius Scipio Barb:itus it is written Lucanaa.
The doubling the vowel belongs to the Oscan and the old Latin: in the Julian
inscription at Bovillre we find leege.
87 Livy 1v. 37. • See above 11ote 206.
 lllSTORY OF RmdE. 71

is by placed Diodorus in 01. 85. 3, in the year of Rome 314 288 ; nor
is there any contradiction between this statement and Livy's, that
the olcl citizens were overpowered and massacred by the s~ttlers in.
the year 331. Three years after the old citizens of Capua had been
exterminated, in 33480 , the Campanians took Cuma by storm, sub­
jected the ill-fated inhabitants to all the atrocities of war 90 , and sent
a colony thither: nevertheless the Greek population was not alto­
gether extirpated. Half a century later it was still called a Greek
city by Scylax; and traces of Greek manners and customs were
subsisting four hundred years after, when the Oscan language, which
had supplanted the Greek, had long since given way to the Latin9 1 ,
The Oscan city of Cuma at the beginning of the fifth century was
already independent of Capua; which in other cases clearly exer­
cised a supremacy over the places round about it. Nola however
has no connexion with the Campanians, nor has Nuceria: the former~
as has been mentioned already, 9 ~ there is good ground to regard as.
a Greek city.
About the year 390 the Campanians and Samnites were the only
people known to Scylax of Caryanda* between the Vulturnus and
the Silarus. They possessed the whole country here from the Tyr­
rhenian across to the upper sea: on the latter he assigns them the
coast from mount Garganus to Picenum, which he includes in Um­
bria93. The same period \Vas that when Lucania had attained its
greatest extent, so that all the seaports from Posidonia to Thurii
are mentioned by him under this head. The union between the
Lucanians and the Samnites from whom they sprang, had soon been
br~ken by distance and the magnitude of their conquests.
Their first territory was on the lower sea: they did not yet touch
the gulf of Tarentum, the coast of which was in the possession of
288 Diodorus XII. 31. .,.;, t9vo~ .,.,.,,, K.:tµ?T.:tv1»• O"UVEO''l'".
80 Livy 1v. 44. According to Diodorus, XII. 76, in 01. 80. 4. 331.
00 Strabo v. p. 243. c. Diodorus XII. 76.
01 Scylax, p. 3. Strabo v. p, 243. c. Velleius 1. 4. Livy XL. 42.
!)2 Above p. 50, note 238.
The age of this geographer has been discussed by the author in his
Kleine liistorische Scliriftcn vol. I. p. 106.
93 The name of the people he places between the Iapygians and Um­
brians, is written both in the title and text t!.a.uvi'l'<t.l. Now I will not deny
that the Daunians may also have been called Daunitre, though the instances
cited to prove it arc not worth much. But I deny that the Daunians d~lt
to the west of their 01cn country; I deny that Scylax could say of them that
they extended from sea to sea; whereas this might be said with perfect accu­
racy of the Samnites, whom he has named as occupying the coast between
Carnpania and Lucania: hence I am confident the right reading is :l::<uri-r.:tt.
 72 IIISTORY OF ROME.

the Greek cities. ·when the Greeks first colonized that coa~t,
there were no Lucanians; the country belonged to the Chonians and
Oenotrians: with the wide spreading of the Samnitcs and the set­
tling of the Lucanians in Oenotria came the wars between the
Greek cities and the barbarians, which ended in the ruin of the
former. This is what Strabo says 294 : his expressions may seem to
imply that the invasion of the Lucanians occurred in very early
times, soon after the founding of the Greek cities; but this is not
his meaning.
When Sybaris was ruling over the country between the two seas,
there can have been no Lucanians in it yet: the fall of that city
took place in 01. 67. 3, 242. Nor could any powerful barbarians
be masters of the coasts between Posidonia and Laos about 280,
when l\Iicythus built Pyxus there 05 : although it is possible they
may already have established themselves in the interior, in the parts
too distant for Croton to subdue or to protect. Before the Luca­
nians came into hostile collision with the great citi~s on the bay of
Tarentum, they had established themselves, as has been observed
above, on this western coast96 , evidently Ly the conquest of Posidonia
and its confederate towns. Now were we bound to assume that the
dominion of the Lucanians at Posidonia put an end to the use of the.
Greek language there, at least on public monuments, it would .be
necessary to postpone the date of that cbnquest till after the Pelo­
ponnesian war; since, while many of the coins are exactly like the
most ancient coins of Sybaris, not a few from the letters on them
cannot-be earlier than that epoch. But from the Jf!elancholy custom
which by the account of Aristoxenus 97 was still prevalent about the
middle of the fifth century, we see there was a subjugated Greek
community then dwelling in the Lucanian city of P!I!stum, con­
sciously verging to its extinction, but still subsisting under foreign
dominion: that is, the Lucanians were settled there as a sovereig11:
colony, having reduced the previous inhabitants to subjection. Po­
sidonia is stiil regarded as a Greek city by Seylax: and as the Greek
character was always used on the coins of N'.lla, and even on those
of Capua occasionally, nothing can be proved from such a ci;cum­
stance as to the time when Posidoniawas taken.. The probability

2()4 Strabo v1. p. 253. b. '1""- ,..,.v A•u&<tv"'v x_r,op1«, ,.· (I. o'l) ... ~, J'wrip«c
01
oUx, )i7rrrovrro Bei.>..ci<Tcrn, 'ltpOrrtpov, ~>..A' oi EA1'.JtV!" i~utpirrovv, oi 1T0v Tei.pt.t.V·
lflvov lx,ovTe' x.6>..7rov· 'lt'plv JI Tori, t E>..>..nva., h.Bclv, o~rf' :cra.v W-4> .A1v¥etvol·
1

X(t}YH' J'S x.t.t.; Oht.tnpol 1TaU, T01f'o" hEµ.ovrro. x.. rr. x.

95 Eckhel. Doctr. num. 1. p. 152. ()6 Strabo v1. p. 254. c.
97 · Athenreus xiv.. p. 632.
 HISTORY OF ROl\IE. 73

is, the Samnites did not spread into these more remote and incom­
parably less tempting regions, till after they conquered Campania,
where the gates of Vulturnum opened to them in 314. Thurium
was built in 306 (01. 83. 3), without any hindrance from hostile
barbarians: and her rapid growth is a proof that none were standing
in her way. Her only quarrel was with Tarentum; and this was
settled at the peace concluded by her general, the Spartan exile
Clean<lridas, by virtiie of which Heraclea was founded in the year
319, 01. 86. 4 298 , Thirteen years before, Cleandridas was enjoying
such influence and dignity in his native country, that at the time of
this treaty we must suppose him to have at least reached the ex­
treme height of manhood; nor can his powers have continued
adequate to the functions of a general a great many years longer.
But the very earliest mention of the I~ucanians is on occasion of
the skill and courage he displayed in leading the Thurians against
them, as well as against Terina9 9 : which last circumstance proves
that the country between the two cities had not then been occupied
by the Sabellians. Antiochus closed his Sicilian history with Ol.
89. 1, 328; three years before the Samnite colony gained exclusive
possession of Capua: so that this is about the point of time to
which we must refer the boundaries he assigns to Italy; and ac­
cording to these the Lucanians had advanced. as far as the Laos.
Thirty years later, Ol. 96. 4, 359; the Italiots 300 concluded the first
general defensive league entered into by the Greek settlements on
these coasts; and it was directed agaiost the Lucanial(S and against
Dionysius1. ·The capital punishment denounced against the general
of any city, if its troops failed to come forward on an irruption of
those barbarians, shows the greatness of the danger that threatened,
\vhen so much alarm was confessed: yet the Lucanians <lid not
number at that time more than thirty-four thousand fighting men 2 •
In the year 362, Ol. 97. 3, the Thurians were completely defeated
and almost exterminated near Laos 3 , of which the Lucanians had
then made themselves masters. After this battle their conquests
spread like a torrent, being promoted by the ruin that the Syracusan

298 Strabo v1. p. 264. c. D9 J'olyrenus n. 10. 2. 4. and I.

300 The Greeks of the Oenotrian Italy.
1 Diodorus XIV. 91. 2 Diodorus XIV. 101. foll.
3 The text of Diodorus has: /2;u1>.0µ001 (oi 0o~pm) 1'.«ov x«l ?ro>.1v
eul«lµov<l. ?ro1>.1opxn1T<l.I" who ever used the phrase, £Bvo; or 1>.<l.ov ?ro1>.1op1t'ii1T<1.1?
The true reading is: ~ou>.6µ001 A;;:ov 7TO.\IV eul:1.lµotr1. ?ro>..: and we are led
to do it by Strabo VI. p. 253. a. b. where likewise instead of t7rl T<1.uT~P >-"-•'
we must read,•·"· Ai:ov. •
1.-K
'74 IIISTORY OF ROME.

tyrants brought on the Greek cities. Dionysius the younger, who

concluded a peace with them before 01. 105. 2, 393 30 4, had begun
during the war to fortify a line on the peninsula between the Scyl·
letic and the Ilipponian gulfs for the protection of his Italian pro­
vince5.
This was the time when the Lucanian state had reached its
greatest extent. Only three years after, 01. 106. 1, 396 6, the
Bruttian people makes its appearance: it arose out of such bands
as flock together in a time of utter confusion, when wars are carried
on unceasingly with mercenaries; and out of revolted bondmen,
who either assumed the name of runaway slaves in mockery, or
adopted it when cast at them as a reproach7. But when they took
rank among nations, they too were to have a heroic pedigree; and
they paid honour to Ilruttus, the son of Hercules and Valentia, as
the father of their race": so far were the ancients from taking such
genealogies literally; in the one just mentioned the right of being a
nation is evidently deduced from courage and strength. It must
not be overlooked that this was certainly not the first time the Brut­
tian name was heard in Magna Griccia: about perhaps eighty years
before, the City built on the Traeis- by the descendants of the Sy.
barites after escaping from the carnage at Thurii, had been destroyed
by Ilruttians 9 • Wherever a whole population is reduced to bondage,
general insurrections will always ensue; like those of the Helots
and Penestre in Greece: thus there must always have been Bruttians
in Italy. That the people so called in later times, who at last
were completely successful in an attempt often ineffectually re­
newed, drew their origin from a mixture of races, and in part from
those Oenotrians who had been moulded into Greeks, is proved by
their speaking Greek along with Oscan 10 , To the Greek cities
they were still more formidable neighbours than the Lucanians
themselves: they were avenging the servit~de of ages: the times
too kept on growing more disorderly. Before they make their
appearance in Roman history, Terina, Hipponium, and even Thurii
304 Diodorus xvi. 5. 5 Strabo. vi. p. 261. c.
6 Diodorus xvi. 15.
7 By the.Romanslthey were also called Brutates, Fest. Epit. y. Brutates
bilingues. .
8 Steph. v. Bph'l"o,.
9 This is the way Wesseling ought to have solved the doubt which oc­
cupied him in his note on Diodorus xu. 22. Diod 0 rus does not give the name
of the town: it must have been Sybar is: and in Strabo v1. p. 264. c. we should
read t11"l Tpd.tno' ~u~"P'' instead oft. TeuBpe.t.v<ro,.
10 Fest. Epit. v. bilingucs Brutates; and Scaliger's note.
 llISTORY OF ROME. 75

had been .laid waste by them: the last city sprang up again like a
weakly shoot from the root of a tree that has been felled; as Olbia
did after its destruction by the Sarmatians'*. Lucania, after being
abridged of the larger and fairer half of her territory, was prudent
enough to make a timely resignation of her hopeless pretensions,
and to join in au alliance with her former subje~ts, for the sake of
indemnifying herself by conquests on the Tarentine gulf: and she
pushed forward her frontier almost to Tarentum: whereas in Scy­
lax the Lucanian coast does not extend beyond Thurii; and
Heraclea, the ancient Italy being out of the question, is assigned to
Iapygia. By this enterprise however three Greek princes, Archi­
damus, Alexander the l\Iolossian, and Cleonymus, were drawn over
to Italy; ai;id at last by the attack on Thurii the arms of Rome
were turned against the Lucanians. 'Vhen they come forward in
Roman history, they are torn by internal dissensions, feeble, and
spent, like a state where the citizens choose rather to rule ov~r a
multitude of bondmen and subjects that far outnumber tliem, ihan
to unite with them and form a great and powerful nation: that they
were rich, is proved by the spoil the Romans took from them; and
that the owners of such wealth should be unable to defend it, is
what might be looked for in a state where the commonalty was in
servitude. What Strabo can mean by terming Petelia their metro­
polis, and Consentia that of the Bruttianst, is a mystery.
Between the Sabines and Samnites lies the country of the Mar­
sians, l\'.Iarrucinians, Pelignians, and Vestinians: which of itself
would form a ground for conjecturing them to have been of the
same race. It is true, we find a statement that the Pelignians were
of lllyrian origin 311 : but it is opposed by evidence of incomparably
greater weight; that of Ovid, who, himself a Pelignian, terms the
Sabines the ancestors of his countrymen 12• Other Roman poets
are almost equally expres3 in accounting the Marsians among the
Sabellians : in Horace the same incantations are called l\'.Iarsian and
Sabelliants; and Juvenal speaks of the Marsians and their Sabellian
fare14. The word lternx, which Servius calls Sabine, is said by
an older Scholiast to be 1Vlarsic15• But if the l\farsians were Sabel·
* Dion Chrysost. Orat. Borysthenit. near the beginning.
t .Strabo v1. p. 244. a. p. 25G. a.
311 Festus v. Peligni. 12 Past. 111. 95.
13 Epod. xvn. 28, 29. Sabella pectus increpare carmimi., Caputque
Marsa dissilire nrenia.
14 111. 169. Translatus subito ad Marsos mensamque Sabellam. ·Virgil
too might mean to intimate this, when he wrote Georg. 11. 167.
15 Servius and the Veronese Scholiast on lEn. vu. 684.
76 HISTORY OF ROME.
lians, so were the Marrucinians, whose affinity to the Marsians WafJ
recognized by Cato, and expressed by one of the strange etymol­
ogies so common among the ancients 318 • Their name was formed,
after the usual Italian practice of heaping one derivative termination
on another, from .lllarruvii, which was .a variety of the name
llfarsi17; ·and it might just as well have been .Marsicini. Another
passage in Juvenal, whose language is very remote from that indefi­
niteness which in fact is only ascribed to poets by the superficial,
couples the Vestinians with the l\larsians in a way which, when
fairly considered, implies the identity of their national character,
and that it was the same with that of the Sabellian race, so famed
above ~11 others for the severity of its morals 18 • Moreover those
four tribes were united in a federal league; which is a ·ground for
inferring their common origin, though certainly not a proof of it.
When the Vestinians joined the Samnites in 429, a general war
with the other ·three tribes appeared to be inevitable, if Rome haz­
arded the attempt to disable her new enemy by a sudden attack 19 •
In the list of the militias which the nations of Italy were able to
bring into the field in case of need at the time of the Cisalpine war,
the number of the troops belonging to these four tribes is given by
Polybius in one sum 20 • Ennius too mentions them together 21 , all
but the Marrucinians; whose name however may have begun the
next verse, the quality of the second syllable allowing it: if the poet
did not speak of them specifically, he may have satisfied himself
with reflecting that they were Marsians.
The Hernicans are remarkable in history for standing in a sin­
gularly favourable relation to the Romans, as their allies on a footing
of equality; and their common hostility to the Ausonian tribes, by
which the hills of the Ilernicans were almost surrounded, was evi­
dently the bond of this union. This gives a show of probability to
316 Origg. II. in Priscian 1x. p. 871. Marsus hostem occidit prius quam
Pelignus: inde 1\Iarrucini dicti, de Marso detorsum nomen.
17 Virgil .lEn. VII. 750. 1\Iarruvia de gente. A poet's worth is not de­
termined by his learning: but to do justice to Virgil, we ought to acknowledge
his great erudition in history and antiquities of every sort, on which the
scholiasts bestow well-deserved praises. From Marruii (like Pacuius instead
of Pacuvius) came .Marruici, .Marruicini.
18 xiv. 180. 181. 0 pueri, Marsus dicebat et Hernicus olim, Vestinusque
pater.
19 Livy vm. 29. Marsi Pelignique et Marrucini; quos, si Vestinus at­
tingeretur, omnes habendos hostes.
20 II. 24.
21 Fragm. Ennii ed. Hesselii, p. 150. Marsa man us, Peligna cohors, fe11­
tina (!. Vestina) virum vis. '
 HISTORY OF ROME. 77
the statement of Julius Hyginus, that they were Pelasgians 82 ~; wl10
must in that case have maintained themselves on the advance of the
Opicans in their impregnable strongholds. His testimony however
is of no value; and the contrary statement, which ranks them among
the Sabellians, is strongly supported by their name being said to
come from the Sabine and l\farsic word liernm, rocks, a derivation
which is well attested and seems exceedingly credible. According
to Servi us they were sprung from the Sabines: according to an
older scholiast they were a Marsian colony 23 : so that their settle­
ment must be referred to the period when the Sabines were pushing
forward to the sea along the Tiber as well as in the south.
· The course of the Italian national migrations as of others was
downward from the north; and the only natural meaning of Cato's
opinion, that the neigbourhood of Amiternum .was the original
source of all the Sabellians, is, that this district was fixed upon by the
oldest traditions, whether they may have been those of the Sabines
'or of the ancient Umbrians, as the abode of the people who took
Reate. Dionysius indeed seems to have conceived that Cato de­
rived all the Sabines, and consequently all their colonies also, from
the village of Testrina near Amiternum, as from a single germ: but
surely so extravagant an abuse of the genealogical notions ~bove cen­
sured ought not to be imputed to a man of Cato's sound under­
standing. He must have known and remembered how numerou·s
the nation was in the time of its greatness; when it counted perhaps
millions of freemen. Three hundred and sixty thousand Picentines
submitted in the fifth century to the dominion of Rome 24 : now it
is probable indeed that this number included, not the able-bodied
citizens alone, but, like Cresar's account of the Helvetians, all who
were free; the Picentines however were among the less consider­
able of the Sabellian tribes: and, though they and others of their
race may have.incorporated the people they subdued, the opinion,
which Dionysius fancied he found in Cato, is not the less absurd.
At Reate, in the Sabina, in the country of the Marsians, the
people tliey found, and subjugated or expelled, were Cascans: in
the district of the Pentrians they were Opicans; who probably had
also taken the place of the Italians about Beneventu'm, and in the
land of the Hirpinians. On the left bank of the Tiber their settle·
ments in the time of the Roman kings reached low down, inter·

322 Macrobius v. 18.

23 Servius and the Veronese Scholiast on lEn. vu. 684.
24 Pliny 111. J 8.
78 HISTORY OF ROME.
mingled with those of the Latins, even to the south of the Anio;
and were not confined to Collatia and Regillum 825 , and to two of
the hills of Rome. The wars with the Sabines form a main part
of what is contained in the earliest annals of Rome: but with the
year 306 they cease entirely: which evidently coincides with their
diffusion in the south of Italy. The tide of overflowing population
from all the Sabellian tribes now turned toward this quarter; and the
old Sabines on the Tiber became quite insignificant.
Strabo calls the Sabines Autochthons 29 : this, applied to a people
whose spreading falls so clearly within the range of history, can
only mean that they are not a colony from any foreign nation.
What induced him to make this remark, might be the fiction of the
Tarentines, which was still extant in books, that the Samnites con­
tained a mixture of Laconians: Strabo's sound sense however re­
jected this as a frivolous compliment to a powerful neighbour 2 1.
Others had devised the same. admixture for their parent race, the
Sabines: Amynche or Amyclre on the Liris, it seemed, must needs
be a colony from Sparta; and so the poets, though perhaps none
prior to the Alexandrians, sang that it was founded by the Dioscuri
along with Glaucus 28 • Further traces of Sparta were now sought
for and presumed to exist in the vicinity: Caieta was derived from
K1:t1a'.·'"" : the goddess Feronia was referred to the Laconian Pharre;
some Lacedemonians were said to have landed on the Pomptine
coast, not however in the heroic age, but in that of Lycurgus, and
from thence to have proceeded into the interior and joined the
Sabines29 : an absurdity I should not allow a place to in this work,
unless it exemplified and illustrated the origin of much that pro­
fesses to be traditional.
As I have already observed, it is by no means improbable,­
though it is a point we are not at liberty to assume in a historical
investigation which earnestly seeks after the truth, and which be­
lieves in historical truth,-that the Sabellians and Opicans were
only branches of one stock. The language of the Sabines must
have been altered in the conquered countries, by intermixture with
those of such nations as they subdued but.did not exterminate; yet

325 Livy 1. 38. n. 16. 26 v. p. 228. c.

27 v. p. 250. b. c. 28 Servius on lEn. x. 564.
2£1 Dionysius II. 49. The native books in whiCh this story occurred,
were not Sabine ones, but those of Gellius, whom Dionysius mentions in his
introduction among his authorities. This is clear from Servius on lEn. vm.
638: where the only reason for mixing up Cato's name with the rambling
discussion, is, that he too derived the name of the people from Sabus. ·
 HISTORY OF ROME. 79
all the Sabellians spoke a common one. To prove the Sabine
origin of the word multa, Varro says it was still found in the Sam­
nite language 330 ; and to show that Cascus was a Sabine word, he
adduces the meaning of the name Cassinum, a place inhabited by
the Samnites, the offspring of the Sabines 31 • This leads us to con­
jecture that the original Sabines, who had been Roman citizens so
long, had ceased to speak their own language: seventy or eighty
years later it is remarked by Strabo, that the language of the Sam­
nites and Lucanians was also extinct39 • I have already observed
that liernre, rocks, was a Sabine and a Marsic word. The Campa­
nian Oscan must have been the dialect the furthest removed from
the Sabi'ne38 , and must have subsisted the longest: it had not become
quite obsolete at Herculanum and Pompeii wl1en they perished.
The l\Iarsic inscription given by Lanzi is not to be made out in
the present state of our information on the Italian langauges; although
a close approach to Latin is strikingly evident. The characters
used by the Marsians and their confederates, together with the
Frentanians, and assuredly by the ancient Sabines too, were the
Latin; which ·are also found on the table at Bantia: of the Samnites
we have no written monuments save coins, which, like all the Cam­
panian, except those with Greek inscriptions, have Etruscan letters:
this however is no ground for imagining even the remotest 'affinity
between the languages. The coins of the Lucanians have the name
Lucanorn in Greek letters; so that they probably used these instead
of the Etruscan. Nor was this alphabet all they adopted: heredi­
tary enemies .as they were to the· Greek cities, they nevertheless
acquired such a familiarity with their language, that their embassa­
dor astonished and won the hearts of. the popular assembly at
Syracuse by the pure Doric he spoke 34 : nor would the authors of
Pythagorean treatises have taken the mask of imaginary Lucanians,
had it not been notorious that this philosophy found re.ception
among them, or had it been unusual for Lucanians to write Greek35 •
The strictness of their morals, and their cheerful contentedness,
were the peculiar glory of the Sabellian mountaineers, but especially
of the Sabi~es and the four northern cantons: and they preserved it
330 Gellius XI. I. 31 de. L. L. vI. 3. p. 86. Bip.
32 vr. p. 254. a.
33 Sabina usque radices in Oscam linguam egit, says Varro, VI. 3.
. 34 Or. Corinth. among the orations of Dion Chrysostom u. II· 113. ed.
Reisk.
35 However that the notion of Lucanian philosophers in the time of Py­
thagoras, or even long after, must be a fiction of a late age, is proved by the
history of that people. .
 80 HISTORY OF ROME.
long after the virtues of ancient times had disappeared at Rome
from the hearts and the demeanour of men. Else the several tribes
of a nation have seldom been so different, as those of this great
people: the Samnites, Marsians, and Pelignians, were fond of war,
and clung to liberty even unto death; the Picentines were sluggish
and cowardly; the Sabines simple-hearted and honest; the Luca­
nians ferocious freebooters. As to the Campanian knights, they
were so estranged from their ancestors, that they are quite out of
the question here. All the Sabellians, but especially the Marsians,
practised divination; principally from the flight of birds. The
Marsians also boasted of being able to charm serpents, and of hav­
ing magical cures for their bites: and to this day the jugglers, who
are wont to handle these reptiles familiarly, as one of the chief
tricks they exhibit to the populace of Rome and Naples, come out
of the same country, from the Lago di Celano in the Abruzzo.
Most of these tribes, and among the rest the Sabines, lived in open
hamlets ; the Samnites and the members of the northern confederacy,
like the Epirots, fortified and dwelt. around the summits of their
hills; where a brave people could defend the approaches even
without walls : not that they had no regular towns, but the number
was small. Not a ruin is found in Samnium of the time anterior
to the Romans: which does not arise solely from the ravages of
war. The free shepherd and peasant will build himself a dwelling
on his hills, to suit his wants,. not to hold out against time and war.
Nor are works of art in clay or brass, or sepulchres containing vases,
found any where in the districts purely Sabellian; but only in those
which they occupied as rulers, iri Campania and Lucania.
The Sabellians. would have made themselves masters of all Italy,
had they been united in one state, or even firmly knit in a confed­
eracy, so as to appropriate their conquests permanently and to hold
them in dependence, securing them by colonies. But they differed
from the Romans, in valuing the enjoyment of the highest degree
of freedom above all things; more than greatness and pow€r, more
than the lasting preservation of the state. · Hence the tribes they
planted were not bound to the mother-country; but forthwith became
alien and often hostile to the state they had issued from; whereas
Rome, whose colonies were of small numbers, was secure of their
fidelity; while by their means, and by imparting subordinate civil
rights to her conquered enemies, she converted them into a body
of loyal subjects far superior to her colonists in number. Owing
to this, Campania was let slip from the power of the Samnites.
Without reckoning the cities there, in which the elements of the
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 81

Oscan population regained the preponderance, or the Bruttians,

who were properly foreigners, the Sabellian cantons, at the break­
ing out of the war between Rome and Samnium, were about twelve
in number. Of these the Marsians were joined with the other
three middle states in a federal league, having a community of na·
tional laws, but not under a common government; in the way that
Rome was united with Latium and the Hernicans. The tie by
which, 'as it would appear, at first five tribes, and at a later period
four 336, were united to form the Samnite republic, seems to have been
firmer, but still insufficient. In time of war the Samnites elected
a supreme general, whose Sabellic title Embratur, when moulded
into a Latin word, was used to designate a commander-in-chief.
We find it on the Samnite denary of the Social war, applied to
C. Papius l\:lutilus: by Livy the Samnite commander-in-chief is
termed Imperator, as a Latin one is Dictator or Prtetor. Strabo
says 3 7 that the Lucanians during war elected a king; this was the
election of an lmperator.
The Samnites and the Marsian confederacy, the Sarnnites and
the Lucanians, were hostile to each other: the ancient Sabines and
the Picentines were regardless of the rest. But the Samnites, even
standing alone, would never .have fallen before the Romans, if they
had enjoyed a similar constitution, and that unity to which the
nations of antiquity never attained save by means of a predominant
capital.

336 The Pentrians, the Caudines, the Hirpinians, and the people on the
coast from Surrentum to the Silarus: at an earlier period the Frentllnians also.
But there may h11.ve been a still greater number of Samnite cantons, though
no mention of them has been preserved: with regard to the Caracenians the
matter is very doubtful.
37 vx. p. 254. c.

1.-L
 THE TUSCANS OR ETRUSCANS.

THE fears and attention of the Greeks were excited about the
time of the Persian war by the dominion of the Etruscans over the
Tyrrhenian sea; although Dionysius is mistaken in supposing it to
have been after them that the whole west of Italy was called Tyr­
rhenia by the Greeks: that name belongs to the age of the genuine
Tyrrhenians. When they were confined to Tuscany, and even
there were dependent upon Rome, their renown passed away; and
their former greatness was held to be fabulous by the contempora­
ries of Polybius 338 • In Roman history their importance is limited
to the period between the kings and the Gallic conquest; after
which they are extremely weak in comparison with the Sabellians.
By the Greeks they are mostly mentioned to their discredit, some­
times as pirates, sometimes as gluttons; by the Romans only as
diviners and artists: it is no traditional opinion which has taught
the moderns, that, independently of the extensive empire they once
held, they were one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity.
The ruins of their cities, the numerous works of art that have been
discovered, the national spirit of the Tuscans, who looked upon
them as ancestors to be proud of; even the tempting mystery of a
language utterly unknown; all this has made the moderns pay
more attention to them, than to any other of the Italian tribes; and
the Etruscans at this day are incomparably more renowned and
honoured, than they were in the time of Livy. Unhappily the
interest thus felt has not been combined with an equal degree of
judgment and impartiality: men have not chosen to be content with
knowing what their researches could discover: and no other part
of literature relating to ancient history contains so much that is
irrational and hasty, nay uncaudid, as may be found in what has
been written on the Etruscan language and history since Annius of
Viterbo.
338 II. 17.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 83

I think I have sufficiently explained the origin of those erroneous

opinions on the extraction of the Etruscans, which deceived even
the Greeks, and have led the moderns much further astray, in' pro­
portion as they were anxious to get some key or other to the secrets
of a buried language. It is enough here to remind the reader, that,
from Tyrrhenia retaining its name after its conquest by the Etrus­
cans, two entirely different races were called Tyrrhenians by the
Greeks : the Pelasgians on the i:oast of Asia and on the islands in
the north of the JEgean, and the Etruscans. The latter had still
less title to the name, than the Sabellians in the south of Italy to
that of Oscans33 9; nay exactly the same title as the English have to
that of Britons, or the Spanish Creoles to that of Mexicans or Peru­
vians: indeed the way they acquired it was precisely the same.
Now it being assumed that all the Pelasgians must have come ori­
ginally out of Greece, hence the story of the migration from Thes­
saly was invented: and since the l\:Ieonians were Tyrrhenians, and
it passed for certain at Athens and among the lonians, that these
Tyrrhenians, as well as those of Lemnos, were of the same stock
with the ancient inhabitants of Agylla and Tarquinii; since the
Meonians and Lydians moreover were confounded in the selfsame
manner as the Tyrrhenians and Etruscans 40 ; this gave birth to the
story concerning the emigration of the ancient Tyrrhenians from
J,ydia; which story Herodotus, in one of his less fortunate moments,
may perhaps have under8tood of the Etruscans.
Dionysius, though he had not detected the source of the error,
makes a stout stand against the two assumptions, which are equally
fallacious. That the story told by Herodotus had no Lydian tradi·
tion to rest upon, he proves by the unexceptionable authority of
Xanthus; that, even if there had been such a tradition, it would
deserve no credit, by the complete difference of the two nations in
language; usages, and religion. His assertion that the language
spoken by the Etruscans was a totally peculiar one, ::.nd bore no
affinity to any other, would deserve our full belief, even if we had
nothing beyond it; because the Etruscan was then, and indeed long
after, a living language, and books in it were reaclH. It is however
339 Above p. 51, note 206.
40 The Lydians, a branch of the same family with the Cariana and My­
sians, were foreign conquerors and barbarians.
41 The verses of Lucretius,
Non Tyrrhena retro volventum carmina frustra
Indicia occultro Divum percurrere mentis.
show that in his time the Etruscan books were still read in the original, from
right to left (retro). I will remark by the way that by indicia mentis Lucre­
tius means to explain indigitamenta.
84 HISTORY OF ROME.

but too strongly confirmed by all our inscriptions, in the words of

which no analogy with the Greek language or with the kindred
branch of the Latin can be detected, even by the most violent ety­
mological artifices; so that nothing short of some wonderful dis­
covery will ever turn this dead treasure to account349• In opposition
to the unanimous evidence of the ancients, who assert with equal
positiveness that the Tuscan language was distinct both from the
Sabine and from the Oscan, an opinion has arisen among the
Italian philologers, that all the nations of Italy, any remains of
whose languages occur in inscriptions, with the exception of a few
nameless races in the south, spoke only dialects of the same funda­
mental language. An unprejudiced investigation, such as there are
ample means of undertaking, will convince every one, as it has
convinced me, that the Tuscan bore just as little affinity to the
Oscan, as to Latin and Greek.·
It is in compliance with the evident usage of the ancients that I
here call the language of the Etruscans the Tuscan : nor shall I
scruple henceforward to call the people themselves Tuscans: not­
withstanding that Tuscus can be nothing but another form of Tur­
inus. In Cato's time the country was commonly styled Etruria,
the people Tusci: Etrusci in later times grew to be more usual in
books. The old name however must have continued the prevalent
one in the mouth of the people: hence under the later emperors the
name of Tuscia for the country, which till then had not been used
in writing48 ; and hence, since the middle ages, Toscana, and Tos­
cani for the people. Etruria and Etrusci presuppose the simple
form Etruri: and this we may hold to be the name originally given
by the Italians to the conquerors of the Tyrrhenians: although the
name both of Tuscans and Etruscans was no less foreign to the
people than that of Tyrrhenians: the one they gave themselves was
Rasena44 • •

342 Among all the Etruscan words said to have been made out, only two,
avil ril, vixit annos, seem to have been really explained: and it is in this very
instance that Lanzi flounders (T. u. p. 322.), because no shadow of an etymo­
logy can be found for ril meaning year. Turce is interpreted i:niu: I should
rather take it to be Tuscus. ·
43 Servius, on lEn. x. 164, censures the word as a novelty.
44 Dionysius 1. 30. The termination ena in Etruscan answers to the
Latin ius, as is shown by the gentile names (see note 922): so that the root is
Ras. This statement of Dionysius however should only be understood with
reference to the ruling people; their vassals might retain the old name of
Tyrrhenians {see note 342): even though they had exchanged their language
for that of the conquerors, like the Christians in Asia Minor.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 85

In the age of their greatness the Tuscans, having subdued the

more ancient Tyrrhenians and the Umbrians, dwelt in Etruria pro­
per and in the country about the Po. The Rretians too, and other
Alpine tribes were of the Tuscan race, as we are expressly assured
by Livy 845 : so, according to Strabo, were the Lepontians and Camu­
nians4&; perhaps the Euganeans also, who inhabited Venetia before
the founding of Patavium: and the language of the people of Groe­
den in the Tyrol, which, mixed as it has been with others, still
seems to stand alone in such roots as are peculiar to it, may not
unreasonably be consideted as a relic of the Etruscan4 7, Mount
Brenner· formed the northern boundary of the Rretians, and cons·e­
quently of the Etruscan race. Ilut were these Rretians, as the
common opinion would make them••, Etruscans of the plain, who
had retired to the Alps on the invasion of the Gauls? \Ve must
suppose the vallies of the. Alps to have been almost uninhabited,
ere this can be conceivable: for a people who had not been able
to withstand the Gauls either in the field or behind their ramparts,
would have been much less able, when routed and flying, to wrest
the land of the mountaineer from its owner. But these regions were
far from being a desert: Polybius speaks of the inroads into Cis­
alpine Gaul made by the Alpine tribes immediately after the Gallic
invasion. And so long as there was still a home to receive the fugi­
tives on the other side of the Po or of the Apennines, they would
never have moved northward. It would be far easier to conceive
-and Livy's expressions are not adverse to such a supposition49 ­
that the mountains had been occupied by the Etruscans on the Po
as a bulwark· against irruptions from the north; as Theoderic
planted a colony of Goths in the land of the Breones. A rich peo­
ple may seize even upon barren mountains out of ambition; or may
occupy them as a precaution: but for it to send colonies sufficient
to keep down the old inhabitants, when more smiling Tegions are
inviting it50, implies the existence of an extensive and absolute au­

345 v. 33. The spelling Rlu'eti with an h is contrary to all good au­
thority.
46 He says they are of the Rretian race, 1v. p. 206. b.
47 Hormayr Geschichte von Tirol, p. 139. foll.
48 Mentioned by Pliny m. 24. and Justin xx. 5.
49 v. 33: after saying that the first abodes of the Etruscans were on the
coast of the lower sea, and that from thence they had founded twelve colonies
north of the Apennines, he proceed;i: Alpinis quoque ea gentibus haud duhie
origo est, maximeque Rretis.
· 50 Such as the plains and hills of the Venetians, which the Tuscans did
not take possession of, and the conquest of which could .not have been ren­
86 IIISTORY OF ROME.
thority, such as seems quite out ·of the question in a state consist­
ing of cantons, like the Tuscan.
If Rretia on the other hand was one of the original homes of the
Etruscan people, from which it issued and spread, first in upper
Italy, and then to the south of the Apennines, it is very conceivable
that, when those migrations took place, a great part of the nation
would stay behind, because, as the Arragonese said in the introduc- ·
tion to their laws•; 1 , they were unwilling to exchange their rocky
soil for a fat hn<l, lest in leaving ~heir home they should leave their
freedom an<l their virtue: and to these, to the house of their fathers,
m~my of the lost sons may have returned, when the days of their
prosperity were gone. Even the harshness of the Etruscan lan­
guage, which seems to be still su~viving in· the Florentine dialect,
might be alleged as an argument for the people having come from
a mountainous country: for, unintelligible as are the contents of
the Etruscan inscriptions, still they bear unequivocal marks of such
a character: besides a nation in whose language consonants were
not the predominant sounds, would scarcely have adopted the orien­
tal custom of dropping the short vowels in writing. Moreover we
have historical statements, as authentic as can be required for those
times, which testify that the spreading of the Etruscans toward the
south was only by degrees. '
In a very ancient history of the Umbrians it was related that the
Etruscans had conquered three hundred of their towns 52 : so that the
Umbrians must at one time have occupied the chief part pf the
countries which belonged to the Etruscans in the fulness of their
power. It may be said, this refers to the land between the .i\lps
and the Apennines; since, until the irruption of the Gauls, the
Umbrians retained some territory between the Apennines and the
Po. And this was certainly a part; but so likewise was Tuscany,
where we find the ancient towns of the Umbrians low down on the
left of the Tiber, and where they once dwelt as far as the Anio.
Even l\1icali 53 , though he would not part with the persuasion that his
country was the cradle of the Etruscan people, observes that the
river Umbro, at the mouth of which was a district called Umbria,

dered so difficult even by a large population and by fortified towns, as that of

Rretia was by nature and by its people.
351 Mirabeau, Essai sur le Despotisme, p. 238.
52 Pliny m. 19. Indisputably however none of the numbers in the Ita­
lian traditions will less admit of being taken literally than this: it merely
means that there were a great many of them.
53 T. 1. p. 58. comp. pp. 106, 107.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 87

mentioned by Pliny 85 *, reminds him of the Umbrians. In the story

of the Lydian migration, Pisa and the whole country to the rocky
summits of the Alps are wrested by the Tyrrhenians from the Um­
hrians: and Pliny says the Umbrians were the oldest inhabitants
of Etruria, and were expelled by the Pelasgians55 • Though it may
still be denied that Herodotus pronounces Cortona not to have been
an Etruscan city, or supposed that he is mistaken if he does; yet
Crere, Graviscre, Alsium, Saturnia, were occupied by the Etruscans
as conquerors, after driving out the people who in Italy bore the
name of Siculians, in Athens of Pelasgians and Tyrrhcnians 5_6•
Tarquinii too had belonged to the Thessalians, Perusia to the
Achreans; that is, both to the Pelasgians 57 : the founding of Clusium
is ascribed to Telemachus 5 •, and thus referred to Circe's Latins.
Populonia according to soma was a colony of the V olaterrans, who
had driven the Corsicans from this coast59• Among the places the
Etruscans wrested from the Pelasgians; Dionysius mentions Pisa60 :
that it was not originally an Etruscan city, lies at the bottom of the
statement of its being built by Greeks after the taking of Troy.
And allowing this story to be derived from its name seeming to be
a Greek one, yet Cato too held that the Tuscans were not its first
inhabitants 61 • From him or from Varro did Dionysius undoubtedly
borrow his accounts of the spreading of the Etruscans toward the
Tiber. But all statements, however probable in themselves and
well attested, were forced to give way to the tale of a Lydian ex­
traction. For by this the first settlement of the new-comers was
of necessity placed on the coast of the lower sea; which is also as­
sumed by Lycophron: and thus grew up the opinion, which in
Livy passes for certainty, that Tuscany was the original home of
the Etruscans, whence they moved northward across the Apen­
nines and toward the Alps. I will not dissemble, that two Latin '
writers of Etruscan history, Flaccus and Crecina, unquestionably
related, that Tarchon came from the south of the mountains and
built the twelve northern cities, among which was Mantua62 • But
as we find Tarchon here, that is, Tyrrhenus and the l\Ieonian fable,
354 m. 8.
55 Lycophron v.1350--61. Ilerodot. 1. !)4. Pliny n1. R Even Cluver,
though his opinions in other respects are very different from mine, considera
Tuscany as only a later conquest of the Etruscans.
56 Dionysius 1. 20. 21. Strabo v. p. 225. d.
57 Justin xx. 1. See above p. 24. n. 69.
58 Servius on .lEn. x. 1G7. 59 Servius on .lEn. x. 167.
60 1. 20. 61 In Servius on .lEn. x. 179.
. v2 Schol. Ver. on .lEn. x. 198: comparPd with Servius.
88 HISTORY OF ROME.

this is not worth more than the Patavine story of Antenor in Livy.
What the native annals of the Etruscans related of their origin, we
know only negatively; so far as that they said nothing of the Lydian
legend. Among a priestridden people like the Etruscans, the an­
nals must have been in the hnnds of the priests, as even at Rome
they were in those of the pontiffs; and since they considered
Etruria as the favourite land of the Gods 868 , it was natural they
should boast to have been its primitive inhabitants.
At no time did the Etruscans possess the whole of Cisalpine Gaul.
\Vest ward their territory extended only to the Ticinus, where in
those days Ligurians were dwelling, having been driven back by
the Gauls. The land south of the Po too, nearly down to Parma,
belonged to the Ligurians, or was uninhabitable from its swamps.
Romagna was in the hands of the U mbrians, who kept it till the
Gauls broke in. But in tl~e country between the Venetians and
the Gauls, some Etruscan towns maintained themselves until they
yielded to the Romans: Verona is termed by Pliny a Rretian,
Mantua by him and by Virgil a Tuscan city 64 : thus it was in Etrus­
can cities that the most genial and the most elaborate of the Roman
poets were born. Both these may be classed among the twelve
Tuscan towns to the north of the Apennines; which number deci­
dedly included Hatria, Melpum, and Felsina. The first of these,
once eminent for its commerce, gave its name to the upper sea.
Melpum, a very rich town in the Milanese, to the north of the Po,
was destroyed by the Boii, Senones, and fasubres, on the day that
Camillus took Veii, in the year 358 65 • Bononia, under the name
of Felsina, was once the capital of EtruriallO: this too seems to argue
that the nation did not spread from the south of the Apennines.
The twelve cities south 'of the Apennines, which were united in
a confederacy as sovereigns of their respective districts, frequently
as their number is mentioned, are no where enumerated by name;
and it is doubtful, which, among several of those that seem to have
a claim to this pre-eminence, must yield to the others.
· When Livy is relating how the allies volunteered to forward

363 Vegoja, among· the fragments of the Agrimensores, Goes. p. 258.

Scias mare ex rethere remotum. Cum autem Juppiter terram Hetruriw sibi
vindicavit, &c. ·
64 Plin. m. 23. Virg. lEn. x. 199-203. So likewise by Flaccus and
Cmcina. As to Verona, we have certainly to choose between this state,ment,
and that which il.ssigns it and Brixia to the Cenomani. See the notes on
Livy v. 35.
65 Pliny 111. 21. 6G Pliny 111. 20.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 89

Scipio's armament, he says the Etruscan states promised to sup­

port him, each according to its means 36 7; that is to say, they all
did so: but he afterward only mentions eight cities, and what each
supplied. These were Crere, Tarquinii, Populonia, Volateme,
Arretium, Perusia, Clusium, Rusellm: that any would withdraw is
incredible; but a write11 so hasty may easily have omitted some.
Of the towns unquestionably belonging to the number of the sove­
reign twelve, Veii and Vulsinii had been destroyed: and Vetulonium
had disappeared, a city never mentioned in the historical age of
Rome, and but once in the legends; in the story, which Livy has
entirely overlooked, of a protracted war carried on by Etruria
against Tarquinius Priscus and the Romans 63 • Populonia, being a
colony from Yolateme, was not one of the original twelve cities;
it can only have come into the room of an extinct one: now if our
topography be correct in putting Vetulonium near it, then the place
of Vetulonium, which appears from report to have been powerful
of yore, supposing that its destruction was one of those early events
in Etruria which are totally forgotten, may have been taken by its
neighbour, Populonia, as that of Himera was by Thermre. Thus
the number of the twelve Achrean cities, whenever it fell short,
was made up: and. thus we find at different epochs that there were
always thirty Latin cities, and seven Frisian provinces; the whole
number being preserved; but with some new ones amongst them,
to replace such as were extinct or lost. '
A century earlier Corton~ is called by 'l,ivy one of the chief
places of Etruria69 : this makes us the more surprised to miss her
when he enumerates those eight. Now she may have had just as
little to do' with the Etruscans as Falerii had, and he may have'
been led into an error by her situation. But his statement may
also be well founded, and yet the one in Herodotus, which goes
120 years further back, may be no less so: if we conceive that
meanwhile, having long stood solitary and abandoned, she had at
length fallen, and been forced to receir3 an Etruscan colony;
which then, as was probably the case with Populonia, stepped into th'e
place. of some lost city, to wit of Veii. T:·.e omission of her .nam~/
h~wever in Livy cannot be a~counted for by merely supposing that

367 xxvm. 45. Etrurim populi pro suis quisque facultatibus consulem
adjuturos polliciti.
68 Dionysius m. 51.
69 1x• .37. A Perusia et Cortona et Arretio, quw ferme capita Etruriw
populorum e~ tempestate erant.
1.-M
90 HISTORY OF ROME.'
he, or the historian he followed, was guilty of carelessness. The
last years of the Etruscan war, the narrative of which was contained
in Livy's eleventh book, are covered with an obscurity perfectly
impervious. If Cortona was forced at that time to submit to Rome
before the general peace, she would obtain no share in the terms
by which such places as still held out were recognized as states,
though under t~e supremacy of Rome. In that case her conditioa
must have been very different from. that of. those eight cities:
perhaps she was admitted to the inferior franchise, as the Etruscan
town of Saturnia undoubtedly was about the same time.
\Vhatever conjecture we may form on this point, two places seem
to be stiU wanting to complete the number of twelve; Whether
it was made up by Capena, or by Cossa, or by Frosulre, is a
question that cann~t be answered with certainty : it may even have
been a people different from all three, one of which in our scanty
sources of information about Etruria we find nothing but the name,
as is the case with the Salpenates 370 , or of which the very name
never occurs.
Capena certainly in the year 550 could no longer be counted
,among the Etruscan towns; since the Capenates, that is, assuredly
not merely some individuals who had gone over to the Romans,
had already been enjoying the full rights of Roman citizens for 180
years*. Previously they had waged war by themselves against
Rome; and though I think I make out in an extremely disfigured
and obscure statement derived from Cato, that their city was a
colony from Veii, and their ancestors a gencration"bound to emi­
grate by the vow of a sacred spring71 , they might still be an inde­
pendent state: I have before mentioned the analogous case of Popu­
lonia.
But while in this instance every thing is uncertain, there is on ~he
contrary a taler.able probability for excluding the pretensions of
Cossa. Pliny calls it Cossa of the Volcicntes7~: this combined
with the mention of a people bearing almost the same name, the
Volcentes, who .are spoken of along with the Lucanians and Hirpi­
nianst, is a substantial ground for conjecturing that the original
370 Livy v. 31. * Livy v. 4. .
71 In Servius on .lEn. vn. 6!)7. Hos dicit Cato Veientum condidisse
auxilio regis Propertii, qui eos Capenam cum adolevissent miserat. There
must be a gap after Veientum: the words dropt may have been juventutem
Juisse, oppidumque.
72 Cossa Volcientium, III. 8. In the Fasti Triumphales the name is
spelled Vulcientes.
t Livy xxvn. 15.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 'IH

inhabitants of Cossa were not Etruscans, but had kept their ground
against the Etruscans. It is true, that at all events this city could
not be mentioned by Livy o_n occasion of Scipio's expedition; for it
had long sinee been transformed into a Latin colony*. The ruins of
its walls, which are far beyond the dimensions of a colony, belong
to an earlier age; but they prove nothing as to the nation that raised
them; for the style of their architecture is not confined to the Etrus­
can towns.
·The walls of Fcesulce, its theatre, and other ruins that have come
to light there, display a greatness not inferior to that of any other
Etruscan city: moreover it is probable that here as elsewhere Sylla
settled his colony in the centre of a great territory, and not by the
side of a dependent town.: indeed the only ground for its being
doubtful whether the parent city of Florence was one of the twelve,
seems to me, that we must then suppose Livy overlooked her:
which in this case strikes us as more especially impossible. From
her remote situation it is quite incredible that her fall should have
been prior to the general peace.
The territory belonging to each of the sovereign cities contained
several provincial towns, some of them dependent colonies, others
inhabited by subjects, the descendants of the old subjugated popu­
lation. Now it was because the Etruscan state was founded on
conquest, that the nobles had such a multitude of clients, like the
Thessalian Penestce 373 : whom they employed in task work, and with­
out whom their colossal works could hardly have been achieved.
At Rome the relation between the patron and client was the feudal
system in its best form: but even supposing that there was a similar
law of conscience among the Etruscans, binding the patron and
protecting the client, still it was on her free plebeian estate that the
greatness of Rome rested; and none such, it is evident, existed in
any Etruscan city. We do indeed find a slight allusion, which
might be considered as indic~ting that there was a popular assembly
at Tarquinii, distinct from the general body of the ruling houses7 4 •
And this trace certainly is not to be overlooked: but who will war­
rant, that the Ro~an writer followed by Dionysius in a narrative
where all the details must be a late embellishment, did not merely
transfer to Tarquinii the relation between the Roman curies and
• Livy xxvn. 10.

373 Dionysius IX. 5. oi Juvd.'l.,;Td.Tol To~' mv~O'T•H 1.,.,,,_6µ001.

Dionysius v. 3. .,.,;v"' <rd. ,,~v~ (so the Vatic. MS.) <tQ>r Tet.p•uYITD"•
1
74
&«l J/ i1uiv"'' i:irl <r~v ixxl\~O'l<tv ,,."f"-X,B,/,.
92 HISTORY OF ROME.

commonalty ? This is far more probable than that he, knew and
paid regard to the c~stitution of Tarquinii3 75 ,
It was not by popular assemblies, nor even by deliberations of a
numerous senate, but by meetings of the chiefs of the land, the
Magnates (principes Etrurire), that the general affairs -0f the nation
were decided upon7 6, We are not to imagine that the meetings at
the temple of Voltumna were of any other kind, or corresponded
with the institutions of nations r'.'ally free, such as the Latins and
Samnites. These Etrurian chie:'.'l were the persons from whom the
young Roman nobles received instruction in the sacred sciences of
divination77; a warlike sacerdotal caste, like the Chaldeans: these
were the Lucumones by whose ::ncestors the revel~tions of Tages
had been committed to writing78• If the conduct of the priests at
Tarquinii, in sacrificing capt'.-.es, dressing themselves up like infer­
nal spirits, and hurling snakes and burning torches at the enemy,
was common among them, it was natural the name of such fanatics
and jugglers should be transferred to lunatics and madmen 79 , They
were patricians, not kings.. Lucumo of Clusium, Lucumo who
brought succour to Romulus, Lucumo in fine who removed from
Tarquinii to Rome, were represented in the old traditions as only
leading men in their respective cities. The Cilnii, the Crecinre,
were Lucumones, as the Claudii and Valerii were patricians; they
were not less noble than the latter by birth, though as Romans ac­
counted only among the commonalty.
These ruling houses were exposed to those violent revolutions,
·by which an oligarchy is every where threatened, even from1the
midst of its own body, wherever it is not upheld by some powerful
protection from without, open or dissembled. About the middle
of the fifth century the house of the Cilnii were expelled from Ar­
retium by force of arms, as the factions of the noble houses in Tus­
cany banished each other by turns in the middle ages. · It was· also
in the spirit of these unhappy feuds, for the refugees to be restored
by the mediation of the public enemy, the Romans 80 : but when

375 The same applies, and still more strongly, to the mention of the plebs
at Arretium, in Livy x. 5.
76 Livy x. 16. Postulaverunt Samnites principum Etrurire conci!ium.
Q.uo coacto, &c. ' ·
77 Cicero de Divin. 1. 41. de !egg. u. 9. Val. Maximus 1. 1, 2.
78 Censorinus 4, at the end.
79 Fest. Epit. v. Lucomones quidam homines ob insaniam dicti.
80 Livy x. 3. 5.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 93

these had exiled the whole house of the Tarquins, the rigour of
that sentence was not to be mitigated by any foreign intercession.
Even so late as in the second Punic war, we find the government
of the Etruscan cities vested exclusively in the senators, that is, in
the noblesse. In the south ofltaly, where the supreme power was
every where shared between the senate and the people, we know
what were the sentiments of both orders at that crisi:o :. in Etruria,
when a ferment began to show itself, it was entirely suppressed by
securing the submission of the senate at Arretium : the people are
quite out of the question 381 •
Now the want of a free and respectable commonalty,-which
the Etruscans, obstinately retaining and extending their old feudal
system, never allowed to grow up,-was the occasion of the re­
markable weakness displayed by the great Etruscan cities in their
wars with the Romans, where the victory was decided by the num­
ber and strength of the infantry. The same want led to the do­
minion of the serfs at Vulsinii; the story of which, as related by the
meagre writers of doubtful credit who are our historical sources for
the period' of this strange phenomenon, sounds no less incredible
than horrible*. 'Vere that account true, nothing worse can have
been exhibited either in the time of the Anabaptists or by a negro
i.nsurrect~on: but writers who could persuade themselves ·that the
citizP.ns of Vulsinii, in order to abandon themselves to voluptuous
indulgences without interruption, would commit their arms and the
government to their slaves, are not to be trusted implicitly as to the
horrors said to have ensued. · Some report about a very unusual
state of things in an Etruscan city had been fabulously exaggerated
by Greek writers 82 ; and their fictions were foolishly adopted by
the Roman: moreover it was necessary that those for whose exter­
mination Rome had taken up arms, should be represented as ex­
tremely criminal: and lastly the virulence of party spirit was not
without its -influence. The marvel disappears, as soon as we per.­

381 Livy xxvn. 24. * Valer. Max. IX. 1•. Orosius IV. 5.
82 The De Mirabilibus,' inserted among the works of Aristotle, and writ­
ten about 01. 130, in which, as I have already observed, (p. 20.) a great deal
is borrowed from Timams, tells (p. 123, ed. Sylb.) of a Tyrrhenian city
O iv«pt<t., which submitted to be governed by its slaves: this must undoubtedly
mean Vulsinii, whether we suppose the author or, the transcribers distorted
the name. Had the supreme power fallen into the hands of domestic slaves
who had been emancipated,-arid a Greek could scarcely help regarding the
Italian clients as such; for the Thessalians did not write books-the matter
would ~ertainly belong to the class of marvellous stories. But it is historical.
and so requires a rational interpretation.
 94 HISTORY OF ROME.

ceive that the insurgents must have been serfs, not domestic slaves 383 •
They had been armed by the ruling class in the Roman war: their
aid enabled Vulsinii, when deserted· by mo~t of the other .towns, to
be the only one of all the Etruscan cities that carried on an honour­
able struggle year after year against Rome ; and in a fortun::.te mo­
ment she obtained respectable terms*. For the defenders of their
common home to become citizens, was a matter of course: for them
to extend their right of citizenship to a right of inheriting from and
intermarrying with the old citizens, and to a seat in thrl senate,
was no le,;s so: and the complaints against them do not in reality
amount to more, when stripped of the colouring originally laid on by
party hatred, and monstrously overcharged by silly declamation.
The serfs on becomipg masters may have been guilty of excesses:
but what credit for candour can we give to those, who called down
destruction on their native city, because they were unwilling to
allow their fellow-countrymen an equality of rights? who cho3e
rather that their country should cease to exist, than that they should
have to share the rule of it with others. The same national impo­
tence, the same compulsory precipitate liberation of the oppressed,
the same general ruin, were the Roman patricians bringing on,
without knowing in their folly what they were doing, when they
persisted in keeping the commonalty in servitude, and denying them
their equitable rights.
The part taken by the Etruscans in Sylla's war was the act of
the whole people: the Roman franchise was enjoyed by every free
man without distinction, however the old but now expiring consti­
tutions excluded or restricted him at home: and from this war we
may see how great Etruria would have become, if all the Etruscans
had had a country some centuries earlier.
The regal office, not hereditary iri a single heroic family as in
Greece, but elective for life like the Roman, continued at Veii until

383 Neither was it on their domestic slaves that the Argives conferred the
right of citizenship, after their city had been desolated py the disaster ·in the
Hebdoma (Herodot. VI. 83)': it was assuredly on the Gymnetes, the Argi\·e
serfs (see the Lexicographers quoted by Ruhnken on Timams v. ?rlVt<rT1io6,).
Aristotle instead of servants calls them ,,,.,pio1i.01: Polit. v. 3. 133. a. There
are numerous traces among the Greeks of an ancient separation between
those who afterward composed the demus, and the burghers, caused by the
bondage of the former in early times: for instance when the Samian demus,
after overpowering the aristocrats, deprived them of the right of intermarriage
(Thucyd. vm. 21); which must evidently have been an act of retaliation.
* Livy. x. 37.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 95

its fall 384 : at Arretium a king may have often been taken from the
house of the Cilnii85 , A common high priest was appointed by the
twelve cities, and presided at the national festivals 86 : in enterprises
of the whole body the supreme command was committed to one of
the twelve kings, who received a lictor from each city•7, Even
Porsenna, highly as he is celebrated in the old poems, is nothing
in Roman history but king of Clusium. Yet the power of the
whole nation is set in action by him; and in earlier times a union
seems occasionally to have been effected by the power of a supreme
chief: thus all the twelve cities pay homage to Tarquin, considered
as a Lucumo; and the same is implie.d in the legends of Mezentius
and Cceles Vibenna. But from the time when Roman history as­
sumes the form of annals, the cities stand insulated; uniting only
casually and transiently. Yet loose as was the federal bond in
Etruria, it was by this that wars between the cities, of which we
do not find a single trace, were prevented.
Such being the nature of their association,, the islands of Ilva
and Corsica must have been under the dominion, not of the whole
nation, but only of the adjacent maritime cities 88 , Thus too the
Agyllceans had stood alone, when, about 220, while they were still
Tyrrhenians, they attacked the Phocceans of Alalia 89 , to dispute the
possession of Cyrnus. In order to punish the piracies of the mari­
time cities, the Syracusans overran both these islands in 2999°;
and the same must have been the cities to which Corsica is sai.d to
have paid tribute 91 • The Tuscan colony of Niccea in this island
384 Livy v. 1. Had he recollected that he had spoken of Lar Tolumnius
as king ot' Veii but 34 years before, he would not have looked upon this elec­
tion as a novelty. '
85 Tyrrhena regum progenies.
86 Livy v. 1. 87 Livy 1. 8. Dionysius m. 61.
88 llva would belong to Populonia: and so the furnaces for its iron ore ,
must have lain within the territory of that city. The Greeks received the
story, that no ore could be smelted in that island (see Varro quoted by Servi us
on lEn. x. 174., Strabo v. p. 2"28. d.), as a marvel: even at this day it is never
~melted there; because there must be a transport of coal or of the ore, and the
latter is the more convenient: just as the copper ore is conveyed from Corn­
wall to Wales.
89 Herod. 1. 167. It is the Tyrrhenians, who stone their prisoners; the
Agyllreans, who are chastised by heaven: can Herodotus have supposed that
the sin of only one people was visited by the gods, and that others equally
guilty were left unpunished? That Agylla as then had not yet become Crere,
is clear from her consulting the Delphic oracle: the Etruscans would have
been content with their own aruspicy. The treasury of the Agyilreans at
Delphi must belong of necessity to the time when they were Pelasgians.
90 Diodorus xr. 88. 91 Diodorus v. 13.
96 HISTORY OF ROME.

was perhaps an old one of the Tyrrhenians; and from th~m as­
suredly came the Greek name of Ilva, 1Eth11lia: the Tyrrhenians
mentioned among the ancient inhabitants of Sardinia, were unques­
tionably Pelasgians. ·
The same Tyrrhenians too, and not the Etruscans, must have
been the people by whose piracies the western seas were made im­
passsable for peaceful mariners, before the founding of the Greek
colonies in Sicily 8 99 , The same piracies assuredly were the prin­
cipal cause that compelled the Phocreans to employ galleys in their
voyages to Tartessus*. Subsequently all the corsairs of the lower
sea, even the Antiates, seem to have pr.ssed among the Greeks for
Tyrrhenians. But even if the Etruscans have had to ans.wer for
more than they were guilty of, still they fully .deserved to be stig­
matized and hated as pirates: Agylla (Crere) was alone exempted
from the general opprobium 93 • About 250 a station of armed ships
was established by Anaxilaus of Rhegium, near cape Scyllreum, to
blockade the straits against their corsairs 04 • As Etruria was then
at the summit of its greatness, the Tuscans had the command of
the whole Tyrrhenian sea, and sent out large fleets on naval expe­
ditions. In 278 the protection of Hiero king of Syracuse. was
invoked by Cuma against them 95 : by the great defeat that their
navy then sustained, their maritime power seems tq have been
broken, as Pindar prayed that it might .be 96 • For the naval arma­
ment of the Syracusans in the year 299, which conquered llva and
ravaged the Tuscan coast and Corsica, was not opposed by any
Tyrrhenian ships: it was by bribery that Etruria got rid of the
Greek fleet 07, Nor did.any naval force show itself in 368, when
Dionysius, under the pretext of punishing the corsairs, appeared
on the coast of Crere with only sixty triremes, and plundered
Pyrgi98 • But in 448 a Tuscan squadron of eighteen ships came to
the assistance of Agathocles 99 ; probably corsairs. For about. that
time their piracies extended even into the lEgean, whe.re the naval
power of Athens had sunk, and that of Rhodes was.only beginning.
to rise. ·By destroying the Etruscan pirates' the Rhodians earned
the gratitude of the Greek nation400 : this meritorious exploit seems
to have been achieved in the time between the death of Agathocles

392 Ephorus in Strabo VI. p.·267. c. * Herod. 1. 163.

93 Strabo v. p. 220. c. 94 Strabo v1. p. 257. a.
95 Diodorus XI. 51. !j() 'f>yth. I. V. 137-141.
97 Diodorus VI. 88. 98 Diodorus xv. 14.
I
!l!l Diodorus xx. 61.
100 JEI. Aristides Rhod. 11. p. 312. a p. ;3~1'.). d. ed. Cant.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 97

and the expedition of Pyrrhus: for from a prince like the former,
pirates were sure to find protection at the price of sharing their
booty; and their piracies assuredly were not tolerated by the
Romans, any more than those of the Antiates. Indeed it is proba­
ble that they were bound to deliver up all their ships of war by the
treaty; since it was from the Greek cities of southern Italy that
Rome obtained her few triremes and fifty-oar galleys at the beginning
of the first Punic wart.Di.
Treaties between the Etruscan maritime cities and Carthage were
subsisting so late as the time of Aristotle; whereby, as in that with
Rome preserved by Polybius, the right of commerce was regulated,
restricted, and secured. If they also contained stipulations about
giving assistance 2 , these can only have been valid against nations
not included in similar alliances; else Carthage could not have
continued for centuries on terms of friendship with Rome. Per­
haps however the assistance was confined to the allowing levies to
be raised: in the year 443 there were a thousand Etruscan mer­
cenaries8 in the Punic army in Sicily: so, when Pyrrhus was in
that island, levies were made in Italy for the Carthaginians; but
Rome did not send any auxiliaries.
Their fruitful land, rich in internal treasures, supplied abundant
materials for the commercial spirit of the Etruscans; and there
was a time when Tuscany must have been the staple of commerce
among the countries on the Mediterranean, the other nations of
Italy, and the remotest barbarian tribes; with which there was a
communication by a secured high-road across the Alps 4 •
The works of the Etruscans, the very ruins of which astonish
us, cannot, it is perfectly evident, have been executed in small
states without taskmasters and bondmen: but we must not overlook
the great superiority of the Etruscan rulers in this· point to the
Egyptian. , All their works that we are acquainted with, have a
great public object: they are not pyramids, obelisks, and temples,
multiplied without number: if the people suffered in its hard ser­
vice, it was not for idle purposes 5• So too and by means of like
401 Polybius 1. 20. 2 Aristotle Polit. m. 9.
3 Diodorus xix. 106.
4 As far as the Iberians. Pseud-Aristot. nep1 B<tuµ. ,;.,.w.,.µ. p. 102.
5 I grant, no expenditure was ever squandered so lavishly by the
Egyptians, as that which must have been laid out on the sepulchre of the
mythical hero Porsenna, if we might rely on the description of it taken by
Varro from native books. Pliny's expressions (xxxv1. 19. 3, 4.) show that no
trace of it can have been visible in his time: and yet so colossal an edifice
must have lasted undamaged down to this day: so that it can be nothing but
J,-N
98 HISTORY OF RO.ME.

ta~kwork did Rome build, when governed by Etruscan kings: after

she became free, all great works were at a stand, until the republic
had grown rich by its victories and conquests: and when compared
with her oldest works and with those of the Etruscan cities, the
buildings of imperial R.ome make but an inconsiderable figure. The·
walls of Volterra and other capitals are constructed of huge blocks,
and, so far as they have not been studiously demolished by hostile
violence, still subsist in imperishable solidity. The thratre at Fie­
sole, and a colossal building near it, are on an equally grand scale:
yet this style is not peculiar to the Etruscans exclusively. It pre­
vails in all the monuments of Latium and ancient Rome, from the
cell of the temple at Gabii, to the wall round the forum of Augus­
tus: and the probability is rather that it was derived by the Etrus­
cans from the earlier inhabitants of Etruria.
The greatest part of Tuscany is mountainous: the rich valley
through which the Arno flows, was anciently a lake and swamp.
There was a lake from Segna to below Fiesole, and toward Prato:
the valley was blocked up by mount Gonfalina: this rock has been
cut through, and a passage opened for the stream toward Pisa406 •
When the walls of Fiesole were built, this whole extent was still
filled with water; as is proved by the apertures for drains7, The
water covered the site where Florence now stands8 : to refer that
city to the Etruscan age is a notion utterly untenable. But there
has also been a cut made near La Incisa, to redeem the rich fields of
the upper Val d' Arno from the water: unless it was into the Clanis
that the streams, which now form this part of the river, discharged
themselves of yore, and the purpose was to lessen the quantity
of water· in the Tiber. The swamps through which Hannibal
marched*, are those which liave now been drained on the right
bank of the lower Arno: in those days they may have served as a
barrier against the Gauls and Ligurians: perhaps they had been
drained in an earlier age, and afterward for that purpose abandoned
to the irruption of the waters. On the Po, in the neighbourhood of
Hadria, the art of turning off muddy rivers had been practised by

a dream. Indeed a building like the one described by Varro is absolutely im­
possible, and belongs to the Arabian Nights.
406 Of this even Giovanni Villani was aware: 1. 43.
7 The peasant who guides strangers there, has been led by his plain
srnse to find this out.
8 Hence the dreadful inundations the city experienced in the middle
~ges: the ground now baa been much raised.
* Livy xxu. 2. •
 HISTORY OF ROME. , 99

the Etruscans with success: which rivers, if kept shut up between

dams, are continually raising their beds, so that after the lapse of
centuries they stand on a level far above that of the adjoining coun­
try; and hence it becomes necessary to raise the dykes in the same
proportion, until the perseverance of man is at last exhausted in the
unequal contest with the powers of nature. Now one among the
useful arts carried on by the Tuscans in our days, is that of divert­
ing such waters into marshes, in order to draw them off again, when
the fertilizing deposit has been secreted: by this system the Chiana
a
has gradually been converted from barren pestilential swamp into
a rich plain. Where a delta however has begun to form, in the
Po, as in the Nile and the Mississippi, standing waters will collect
between the arms of the river, and its mouths are protruded into
the sea; and the further the mouths advance and diverge from each
other, the broader and deeper do the lakes and inland seas made
by these waters become. It is with reference to the overlaying of
swamps like the Chiana, a process which at the same time prevents
the bed of the river growing higher, that we must understand Pliny's
account of the stream of the Po being guided by the Tuscans into
the morasses of the Hadrians 40 9: similar works are needed there at
this day. The channels too by which the Po discharges itself,
were dug by the Tuscans or by their subjects; and their canals and
dams were the means by which its delta was constructed. An~­
ther method of gaining land in use amongst them, consisted in let­
ting off lakes that had formed in the craters of extinct volcanoes,
by tunnels cut through the sides of the hill. In the territory of
Perugia and in the Suburbicarian Tuscia there are traces of many
such lakes, which are completely dried up; the tunnels are un­
known and never cleared out, but still work.
The renown of the Etruscans, as a nation peculiarly excelling in
the arts, is so established, that I cannot expect a favourable reception
for the conjecture, that the works in bronze and clay and the bas­
reliefs attributed to them, were the produce, not of the ruling peo­
ple, but of their subject bondmen, and that the Etruscans properly
so called were no less alien from the .arts than the Romans. Yet I
believe that the striking difference we observe between the works
of Tarquinii and Arretium, is to be accounted for from the earlier
inhabitant& of northern and southern Tuscany being of different
origin. The works which are peculiar to Volaterrre were occa­

409 Pliny 111. 20. Omnia ea flumina fossasque primi-fecere Thusci;

egesto amnis impetu per transversum in Atrianorum paludes.
100 IIISTORY OF ROME.
sioned by its stone-quarries. But the two former cities wrought
in clay: the produce of Arretium were red vases with very elegant
figures in relief, of a taste altogether peculiar410 : those of Tarquinii
were painted, and in colour and drawing exactly like some dis­
covered near Corinth, and engraved in Dodwell*, while they dif­
fered from the Campanian in all the same particulars as the Greek.
These are only found in the district of Tarquinii; and, where they
occur, those of Arretium are never met with. Their striking re­
semblance to the Corinthian vases reminds us of the story of De­
maratus, and his companions, the potters Euchir and Eugrammus 11 ;
which is clearly meant to express that from Corinth did Tarquinii
derive her skill in handling clay, and the elegance of her drawing
on her vases. This implies the existence of a peculiar intercourse
with. Greece, such as was carried on by the ·neighbouring city of
Agylla.
The Etruscan statues in the earliest ages were of clay; like the
four-horsed chariot on the Capitoline temple, said to have been set
up at the time of its dedication. But the statues belonging to the
first ages of Rome, several of which were long preserved, were
probably uniformly of bronze 19 : and this is the material of all the
masterpieces that shed lustre on Etruscan art.
To deny that this art owed its refinement to the Greeks, is ex­
tremely idle. Its original rudeness is proved by works of a very
early date; and to the Greeks alone was that idea revealed, by
which the human body is fashioned into life and beauty. It was
from their genius that the spark proceeded, by which susceptible
natures have been kindled in every susceptible people. Hence the
subjects of the most beautiful Etruscan works of art often belong
to Greek mythology : but, having once been enlightened, the Tus­
cans were also able to treat their own conceptions in the spirit of
Greeks. One thing that strikes us, as though it were a national
characteristic, is that their drawing is often extremely correct, with­
out any regard to grace: indeed the style is exactly like that of the
Tuscan painters who lived at the revival of art in the middle agesis.
410 Works or this kind were still executed in the time or Augustus, when
the art of making the Cam,Panian vases was utterly lost.
* Tour through Greece n. 196. 11 Fictores. Pliny xxxv. 43.
12 The marble works in the oldest style, whether statues or bas-reliefs,
which are called Etruscan, are probably all Greek: for the quarry at Luna
was not worked till very late. So long as bronze was not too dear, casting
must have been preferred to the far more difficult process or sculpture.
13 On this point Micali's work is extremely valuable. The reader may
look in it at the engravings of Etruscan bas-reliefs, particularly at pl. 28, for
 HISTORY OF ROME. 101

Even supposing the artist who executed the she-wolf of the Capi­
tol, was not an Etruscan, still in this work, which has no coun­
terpart among those of the Greeks, we clearly see what Etruscan
art must have been about the middle of the fifth century. And this
must probably have been the age of their finest gems: every thing
that is tamer, more delicate, and softer, belongs to a later, in part
to a much later period. In the two centuries between the crisis
when the relation of Etruria to Rome was decided, and 'the time of
Sylla, the arts must have been very flourishing: the people were liv­
ing in profound peace and great wealth ; and the prosperity of the
country was only disturbed by two storms which passed rapidly
over ; in one campaign of the Cisalpine, and in the second of Han­
nibal's war.
Tuscan art had no national herioc story to work on: like that of
other countries, it sought for its subjects in the mythology of the
Greeks: so that the stories of Thebes and Ilium must have been
familiar to the people. That the circulation of Greek poems had
spread even into Etruria, is not to be questioned: the West and
Carthage itself were open to Greek literature ; Inycum, that ob­
scure town of the Sicanians, was not the only place where the
Greek sophists made money• 1•; and in earlier times a rhapsodist
must surely have been still more welcome. "When even the Romans
were reading Greek, the study would certainly be yet more preva­
lent amid the quiet of Etruria. But it was not in a foreign lan­
guage alone that the Greek stories were listened to : the works of
art are not unfrequently inscribed with the names of the heroes,
altered however to suit the forms of the Etruscan language; and
this is an unequivocal proof that they lived in the speech of the na­
tion, and in poems in the native tongue. Varro too mentions some
Tuscan tragedies by one Volnius, who, from his way of speaking
of him, seems to have lived not long before 15 : these tragedies might
have been an exercise of ingenuity with which the nation had no
concern : but on the other hand we have evidence in the theatre at
Fresulre that Greek dramas, either originals or translations, were
performed there, as they were in Latium at Tusculum and Bovillre :

the countenances. The idea of pl. 23, which is unlike any thing Greek, and
its execution, are exceedingly fine: the genius of death in pl. 44 is a perfect
cherub.
414. Plato Hipp. p. 282. c.
15 Varro de l. L. 1v. 9. p. 17. Ut 'volnius dicebat qui tragredias Tuscas
scripsit. Volnius is the reading of the Florentine MS. Volumnius, as the
editions have it, is one of the corruptions introduced by Pomponi us Lretus.
 102 HISTORY OF ROME.
were it not so, the construction of such a building in the Greek
form would be unaccountable. Nor can it be doubted that this
theatre was built before the time of Sylla: its size and magnificence
are far beyond the scale of a Roman military colony: besides how
could such a colony have wished for any thing but an amphithea­
tre? There seems moreover to be very good ground for the Flo­
rentine tradition, that Florence was built by Sylla's colony, and
that it did not settle on the hill. However in :µo Etruscan inscrip­
tion do we find any thing bearing the slightest resemblance to the
rhythms of the Greeks, which could not have escaped us even in
a language totally unintelligible ; nor indeed any thing bearing the
least semblance of verse•. The town from which the Fescennine
musical dialogue took its name, belonged to the Faliscans, not to
the Etruscans 416 • .

It was from Etruria that the music of the Romans was derived:
their stage-singers too came from thence. Like the minstrel in the
middle ages, the Etruscan !tister danced and sang to instrumental
music, in which the time served as an equivalent for verse, instead
of any regular measure. Stringed instruments are to be met with
here and there on the monuments; but the proper native instrument
· was the flute.
The Etruscan characters were formed, like the Greek, from the
same alphabet, among the various ones of different origin found in
Asia, whence all the modes of writing used in Europe are derived.
That the Etruscans received it immediately from the Phenicians,
would not be proved by their custom of proceeding from right to
left: but their omitting the short vowels, and their practice of noting
doubled consonants by a single letter, as is done in all the Aramaic
systems of writing, are purely Punic: so is the want of the vowel
0 ; though nothing can be determined from this as to the sound,
which the Semitic languages have.
But the Phenicians designated numbers by letters : not so the
Etruscans. The numerals we call Roman, are Etruscan; and they
occur frequently on their monuments: they are the remnants of a
hieroglyphical art of writing, which was in use before the age of
the alphabetical, and, like the numerals of the Aztecans, represent
some object that was associated with a particular number. They
are indigenous, and belong to the time when the West was sub­
sisting with all its original peculiarities, before it experienced any·

416 Virgil JEn. vu. 695.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 103

influence from Asia; to the time when the Turdetanians were form­
ing their alphabet ·and their literature 41 7,
The profane sciences of Etruria likewise, her medicine, physics
and astronomy, were not borrowed either from the Greeks or the
Carthaginians : perhaps they were brought by the nation from the
North, the seat of her Gods 18 • Here we meet with the same extra­
ordinary phenomenon, which strikes us with astonishment in the
new world, an extremely accurate method of determining time; and
this method, so far as regards the cyclical year, proceeded on the
very principles observed by the framers of the ol<l Mexican com­
putation: portions of time were measured, without regard to the
phenomena of the moon, out of very long periods determined with
accuracy on astronomical grounds: among the Etruscans however
there was also a civil lunar year, the cyclical serving only as a cor­
rection for it.'
Their history, like that of the Bramins and Chaldeans, was in­
serted in an astronomico-theological outline, which included the
whole course of time, and taught, that the human race of the pre­
sent creation has eight secular days assigned to it; each day to a
fresh people ; and that during the continuance of one people pro­
phecy is to be in honour, during that of another in abasement1 9,
The Etruscan week was of eight days; and as it is highly probable
that each secular day, like that of the Etruscans themselves 90 , con­
tained ten secles or 1100 years, 8800 years made a secular week.
The next unit immediately above the week Wa3 the year, of 38
weeks or 304 days. Thus a secular year would number 334,400
years ; and it may be co.njecture<l that this was the period assumed
for the duration of the universe; unless they went o:i to secular
secles. According to their religion, a limit and end was fixed to
,the life even of the highest gods, 91 as in the theology of the Scan­
dinavians: such a secular year then was probably the term assigned
to the life of the gods, as the natural secle was to the life of man,
the secular day to that of nations, the secular week to that of one
human race. · They taught, as we know historically, that the expi­
ration of each secular day was announced by wonders and signs,

417 Strabo m. p. 139. c. Not however that this literature was six thou­
sand years old. Instead of rop.ou' ip.p.ITpou' i~a1<T;t,11'.fair i'l"rn, whlch would
not even be Greek, we must read r. i. i. i,,.,.,,.
Beside these they had histo
ries and poems.
18 Festus v. sinistrm aves.
19 Plutarch Sylla c. 7. 20 Varro in Censorinus, 17.
21 Varro in Arnobius quoted by Micali n. p. 46.
104 HISTORY OF ROME.
intelligible to them4 ~9 : so was the close of every natural secle, ten
of which, of unequal length, made up a great day: the signs by
which each of these epochs had been announced, were recorded in
their history. This, Varro says 23 , was written in the eighth secle
of the nation. A natural secle was. measured by the duration of
man's longest life: the first secle of a state ended with the death of
the longest liver among all the persons born on the day it was
founded; the second lasted until none was left of all who were
living at the close of the first; and so forth. The first seven secles
-0f the Etruscans amounted to 781 years: but the sum total of the
years in the ten variable secles was equal to that in the ten fixed,
each of which contained llO.
In the year of the city 666 it was announced by the aruspexes
that the secular day of the Etruscan people was drawing to a close 94 :
and if we assume, what must surely be granted, that in doing this
they acted in consonance with their writings, then the Etruscan
computation of time began 434 years before Rome, the eighth secle
in the year 347, and the annals mentioned by Varro were written
about the end of the fourth century of the.city. The epoch 666
answers with singular exactness to that at which the nation actually
ceased to exist: it had been incorporated by the. Romans a short
time before, and was almost exterminated by Sylla eight years
after.
A free expansion of the intellect in poetry and science could
never take place among a people whose pride and study lay in divi­
nation and ritual worship. It was from them that the Romans had
borrowed the most important part of that science which makes use
of signs in conjecturing the will of the gods: they alone could see
through the meaning of terrific prodigies, and knew how to appease
the wrath of the celestial powers. The pure and infallible source
of this learning was supposed to be the national property of the
Etruscans, ever since the time when it was taught them by Tages;
a wise dwarf, who rose out of the ground, such as occurs in the
ancient fables of the Germans.
By the East the decrees of desfiny were read in the stars, by
Etruria and Greece in the entrails of victims: in expounding the

422 Plutarch Sylla c. 7. It wa,s in this sense that the comet which ap­
·peared after the death of Julius Cresar was regarded by the aruspex Volcatius
as the sign that announced the end of the ninth secle (Servi us on Eel. ix. 47.
£ited by Voss on Eel. 1v. 5.); although this referred to Rome, not to Etruria.
23 In Censorinus, 17.
24 Plutarch Sylla c. 7.
 HISTORY OF IW;\IE. 105

flight of Lirds, if the Etruscans did not ·altogether neglect it, the
Sabellians were greater masters. Ilut the peculiar secret of the
Etruscans was the interpretation of lightning: this, and all the
branches of their aruspicy, were taught in their sacerdotal schools'" 5 :
they were also laid down however in the sacred books wherein
the oral instructions of Tages \vere recorded. '
In the east and in Italy the soothsayer was a tyrant, and the
abettor of the ruling powers; he alway3 tried to keep the people in
chains. Of this yoke the stirring spirit of the Greeks soon eased
itself; although they were willing to believe that the soul is pos­
sessed. of secret faculties by which it is often enabled to· catch a
glimpse of the future in its forebodings and dreams. Ily ·the nobler
hero of the Iliad omens are treated with contempt, at the call to
defend his country: at Rome the yoke of a degrading superstition,
which was abused as an instrument of tyranny by the aristocracy,
was not broken, until infidelity was introduced by the Calabrian
Greek, Ennius, and became naturalized as morals declined. Such
is the concatenation, of human affairs, that, as the best of things
have something bad growing to them and causing their inward
decay, the extirpation of this incidental evil may afford us some
consolation, when the ruins of what once was excellent are swept
away, with all their pleasing recollections and illusions: there is no
ill without some good at its side.
The contents of the ritual books were of a different kind: they
resembled the Mosaical in prescribing the laws of the state as the
law of the gods; they ordained the course to be observed in found­
ing and building a city, in establishing and consecrating such edi­
fices and places as were to be sacred and inviolable ; they settled
the constitution of the curies, tribes, and centuries 26 , and generally
all regulations relative to war and peace 2 7, . The same too were the
laws originally obeyed by the Romans; who relaxed their' ties,
without casting them aside; and whose anxiety never to abolish
them, but to leave the appearance subsisting when the reality had
lost its meaning, was a result of their original sanctity. Those
books must undoubtedly have been the fundamental text for the

425 See above, n. 377.

26 Such is the expression of Festus: whatever that writer, who is often
mistaken about ancient customs, may have meant by it, these books can only
have related to the primitive constitution, in which the centuries were com­
posed of the equestrian houses. This constitution could not be changed:. that
of Servius Tullius might, like any other, and was so.
27 Festus v. rituales.

1.-0

 1OG HlSTOllY OF ROME.

main part of tl1e pontificial law: the institutions however in which
the preliminary step was to draw the limits of a temple for augu­
ries, such as the law for measuring land and for marking out a
camp, were more probably grounded on the religious books of the
Sabin es.
In the account that remains of the Roman ritual books, they are
expressly called Etruscan: but as in the Roman writings which we
possess, no distinction is ever made between Tuscan and Etruscan,
it is by no means certain that those books were derived from the
same people by whom the doctrines of Tages were preserved.
The same. uncertainty hangs over the Capitoline temple, which is
said to bear marks of the Etruscans in the union of its three deities 1
as well as in its architecture. Indisputably however it was in the
language and literature of the Etruscans that Roman youths of rank
were instructed so late as about the middle of the fifth century, as
they were subsequeptly in those of the Greeks 428 : this veneration
shifted round afterward into contempt for the old-fashioned lore,
and forgetfulness of its existence. Undoubtedly too it was from
the genuine Etruscans that the badges of the highest magistracy
were adopted by the Roman kings.
Tuscany produces all the necessaries of life in abundance, and
the Etruscans were not unwilling to enjoy what nature gave them:
the northern custom of sitting down twice a day to well-loaded
boards, was matter of surprise and scandal to the Greeks, whose
bodies were satisfied with very little nourishment. ··we have a
· description by Posidonius of the way of living in Etruria, such as
it was before Sylla's war~ from the Asiatic luxury of embroidered
carpets, silver plate, and trains of beautiful slaves richly clad 29 , we
may see how the country had thrh·en under the relations in which
r~it stood to Rome: within a few years all this wealth became the
booty of soldiers, and the towns with their territories were par­
celled out among the legions.
As to what Theopompus says concerning the shamele3s pro­
fligacy of the Etruscans,* we may join the modern Italians in
altogether rejecting it: his credulity and his fondness for telling
scandalous stories were· well known to the ancients. Even if his
statement could be partially supported by the fact, that there were
some powerful lords, who, secure of impunity, had abandoned
themselves to horrible licentiousness, such as became the fashion at
· 428 Livy 1x. 36.

29 Diodorus v. 40.· Athenreus 1v'. 153. d.

Athenreus x11. p. 517.

 lIISTORY OF HOl\1E. 107

Rome under the emperors, still. the body of the nation cannot have
been liable to the charge. But that associations for orgies such as
Theopompus describes-such as have been found in the Society
islands-should have existed even among the most cormpt of the
nobles, is the more improbable, since, as has been observed by
others, no licentious representations are to be found on any Etrus­
can works of art.
Etruria was standing at the summit of its greatness about the end
of the third century of Rome. In the next she lost the whole coun­
try beyond the Apennines, with Veii, and Capena: a great part of
th~ fifth century was passed in an irresolute struggle, never carried on
with warlike perseverance by any state except Vulsinii, against the
prevailing star of Rome. After this the nation enjoyed two centu­
ries of inglorious repose: even during. the second Punic war her
prosperity was so far restored, that Arretium by itself was able to
support Scipio's African expedition with arms and corn for a
whole army, and with pay for the crew of a fleet: and in this state
of ease they felt no desire for the Roman franchise, by which such
as shared it were bound to the performance of hard duties. When
they had received it however, they displayed no less fortitude tlian
the Marsians and Samni.tes in maintaining its full honour: but they
were hardly treated by fortune; and her injustice was. increased by
her consigning to oblivion the story of their heroic resistance to
Sylla.
 THE Ul\1BRIANS.

AccoRDING to the practice of multiplying the forms of the Italian

national names, the Umbri must also have been called Umbrici:
this was pronounced Ombrici by the Greeks, who made out that it
contained an allusion to their great antiquity. The name was to
indicate that they had existed even before those rain-floods, by
which in many countries, as the Greek sages agreed with others
in believing, earlier ra!!es of men had been destroyed. This ety­
mological trifling, it is probable, was never meant seriously: it is
certain however that the Umbrians were a great nation, before the
time of the Etruscans, in that of the Sicelians, and that they have
a right to be called a most ancient and. genuine people of Italy 430•
Their city, Ameria, was built according to Cato 31 964 years before
the war with Perseus, or 381 before Rome. It is certain too that
the country they inhabited of old w.as very extensive; probably not
only what retained the name of Umbria, but also, as has been ob­
served already*, the south of Etruria; and, according to distinct·
Roman traditions, the district occupied by the Sabines between the
Apennines and the Tiber. On the north-east slope of the Apen·
nines toward the upper sea and the Po, they are said to have spread
as conquerors, to have expelled the Liburnians as well as the Sicu­
lians from the coast, and to have maintained an obstinate contest
with the Etruscans for the territory on the lower Po.
In history the Umbrians are found restricted to the left bank of
the Tiber; with some scattered towns on the coast and near the
Po, preserved to them partly, as Ravenna was, by her lagoons,
partly by paying tribute to the Gauls. The Ombrica of the

430 Antiquissima gens ltaliw: as the .iEquians too are called; by way of
contrast to the Etruscans who had immigrated, to the Latins who were a
mixed race, to the Samnites and Lucanians who owed their origin to emigra­
tion and conquest, and were likewise mixed races, and so on.
31 Pliny m. 19. * Above p. 86.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 109

Greeks, bordering on the obscure regions at the top of the Adriatic,

is of a large and indefinite extent. In Herodotus it reaches to the
foot of the Alps: for it is from the country above the Ombricans.
that the rivers Carpis and Alpis, one of which may very probably
be the Inn, flow into the Ister4 3 ~. Scylax, who contracts its northern
boundary, reckons Picenum a part of it33 : in the earlier geography
of the poets it undoubtedly extended as far as mount Garganus or
Drion. For the Diomedian islands lie to the west of, that promon­
tory; and certainly Scylax had some poet before him, when he as­
cribed the worship of Tydides, which the later Greeks fancied
they found among the Daunians, to the Ombricans; although, ac­
cording to the correct chorography of his time, he assigns the coast
between the Umbrians and the Apulians to the Sabellians.
For us the name of the Umbrians is a great one that has died
away. At the time when their coast was occupied by a detach­
ment of the Gauls, the loss of these rich countries seems to have
been attended with that of their independence. Without any de­
fence toward the north, on which side Tuscany is sheltered by the
Apehnines, Umbria within its contracted limits is in all probability
one of those adjacent countries which the Gauls are said to have
reduced under their domini0~ 34 : it WaS their military road, SO long
as they made expeditions into Latium. In the first war of the
Umbrian tribes with the Romans they were subdued in a single
battle : and, though afterward hurried or compelled to take part in
the contests of more powerful nations against Rome, they did not
hold out long.
The Umbrian nation consisted of separate races 85 , some of which
dwelt in towns 86, others in rural cantons 87. The Camertes em­
braced the friendship of the Romans; before the latter crossed the
U mbrian borders, and they preserved it: the Sarsinates are even
mentioned as a distinct people by Polybius along with the Um­
brians38; and fighting singly against Rome they supplied her with
occasion for two triumphs.
In order to treat with the Umbrians, the Romans in the fifth
century employed an envoy acquainted with the Etruscan tongue 8 o:
yet on the Iguvine tables the language which passes, and probably
with good reason, for Umbrian, is totally different from the Etrus­
can. To us it is unintelligible, although it contains a number of

432 1v. 49. 33 p. 6. For he places Ancona in Ombrica.

34 Polybius u. 18. 35 Livy xxvm. 45. Umbrire populi.
36 Livy 1x. 41. Plaga. 37 Livy xxx1. 2. Tribus.
38 Polybius n. 24. 39 Livy IX. 36.
110 HISTORY OF ROME.
words which, if not Latin, seem cognate to Latin; and if the con­
jecture I shall communicate further on as to the stock of the Um­
brians is well founded, it could not fail to contain such. The
purity with which the Sarsinate poet, Plautus, wrote Latin seems
also to suggest that the language of his countrymen, like the Oscan
spoken by Nrevius, bore an affinity to the Latin.
The characters on the coins are Etruscan; on the Iguvine tables
Latin.
 IAPYGIA.

lAPYGIA embraced the south-east of Italy; according to the more

ancient writers, from Metapontum, or, including that city, from the
Siris440, to mount Garganus, or, as the Greeks call it, mount Drion;
immediately beyond which it is probable that Ombrica was placed
by their early geographers. By Polybius the Iapygian and l\Ies­
sapian troops are still classed under one head. That such an ex­
tent was ascribed to Apulia by the Romans, we do not find: else it
certainly seems evident that Iapyx and Apulus are the same name 4 J.
This extensive country is said by the Greeks to have been in­
habited by three distinct tribes, the Messapians, the Peucetians,
and the Daunians: the first on' the peninsula to the east of Taren­
tum; the Peucetians to the north of them, along the coast from
Brundusium to Barium; and, between· this and, mount Garganus,
the Daunians. The first about the beginning of the fourth century
were at enmity with the Tarentines, while the two latter tribes
were their allies. The Messapians however are divided, at least
by Strabo, into two tribes, the Sallentines and the Calabrians: the
former he places in Leuternia, on the eastern coast of the Taren­
tine gulf; the Calabrians to the north of the lapygian promontory,
on the Adriatic 49 • In the Fasti hen the Messapians and Sallen­
tines are spoken of as distinct tribes, over both of which a triumph

440 Scylax p. 5.
41 The Latin termination icus is contracted into ix in Oscan: thus
.Rpicus, the same with .Rpulus, becomes .Rpix. No good Roman writer will
ever say Iapygia instead of .!Jpulia: nor any good Greek writer the reverse.
Diodorus, who is no less careless in his use of words than in other respects,
speaks of 'A'll"W"A.U., XIX. IO, in relating the history of Rome for that year,
where he may have had Fabius before him: but it is remarkable that he should
commit the same offence against the Greek .usage in the history of the
younger Dionysius, xv1. 5. Are we justifiable in supposing that Timreus
wrote so?
42 VI. P· 277. d. 281. c. d.
 112 HISTORY OF ROME.

was celebrated in the year 487 : and the simplest way of explaining
this is to suppose. that, though the former name was common to
the whole nation, it is here used for the Calabrians; as that of Au·
sonians came to be confined to a single tribe, a part of the whole
people. An ancient and important statement, which, though ex­
tremely corrupt and disjointed, has been most satisfactorily re­
stored443, informs us that there were five tongues in Iapygia: two
of the tribes that spoke them are clear, the Opicans or Apulians,
and the Peucetians: two may be recognized after an easy emenda­
tion, the Leuternians and Brentesines, corresponding to Strabo's
Sallentines and Calabrians: the name of the people to whom the
fifth tongue is attributed, the Cramonians, may perhaps be written
correctly, and all trace of them may have perished: at all events
Scylax,. who extends Iapygia so far to the southwest, seems to
have meant a people between Heraclea and Tarentum, a remnant
of the Chonian Oenotrians.
The Messapians were supposed very generally, singular as the
opinion sounds, to have been Cretans. In the earlier tradition
their ancestors were Eteocretans, cast on this shore in the time of
Minos, after the unfortunate expedition to Sicania: whether they
had sailed thither with their king44 ; or, as another tradition related,
he had gone alone in quest of D<edalus and had perished, and they
had set out in the vain intention of avenging his death on Coca­
lus45: according to other legends, they had been making an una­
vailing search after Glaucus48 : or they were a band composed of
Cretans and the offspring of the Athenian youths del,ivered up as an
expiatory offering to Minos•7: or lastly, in a story which perhaps
was confined to the Alexandrian poets, they were the adherents of
Illomeneus, led by him, and joined by some Locrians and Illyrians•s.
The last account makes express mention of the Sallentines : and to

443 By James Gronovius, who seldom made so successful a conjecture.

It has been shown above, note 293, that in Scylax, p. 5, ::i<1.uv'i'1'et1 must be
read instead of A<1.uv'i'l"ett. But the sentence £v J'i 'l"Oo'l""'-Il•u"tTli'i, must also
be removed from the place it has been thrust into, wh~re it destroys the sense
of the passage by separating J'iilx.on" .:,,.a ..-oii Tupp. ,,.,1>... 1 . .,.. AJ'p. from
the mention of the Samnites; and it must be inserted in the former section
about Iapygia, after > vu"T"''• and before iv J'f .,.~ 'Iet?T. Still /'I'.'"""""' is a
very strange word here, and yet more so the synonym ,,..,.6,,_,,,..,,,.
44 Strabo VI. p. 279. a. 282. b. 45 Herodot. vn. 170.
46 Athenreus xn. p. 522. f.
47 . Strabo vi. p. 282. b. Plutarch qurest. Grrec. 35, and Theseus c. 16.
48 Varro fragm. I. m. Antiq. rer. hum. p. 205: and Festus v. Salentini,
who has evidently copied from Varro. Compare lEn. 111. 400.
 HISTORY: OF ROME. ll3

these, excluding the Calabrians and their capital Brundusium, do I

also refer the statement of Herodotus, that Hyria was the original
city of the Messapians, from which their other settlements pro­
ceeded. Varro says of the Salentines, that the nation was divided
into three parts and twelve cities 449 : parts here must mean tribes 50•
His etymology for the name of the Sallentines is after his fashion
and ridiculous·: the word clearly comes from a town Sallentum,
which in Greek must have been called Sallas or Sallus: and I have
· no doubt that it existed in ancient times; but it is no less certain
than singular, that no mention is any where made of it51 • From
these Messapians were the Bottireans on the gulf of Thermre said
to have derived their origin: Strabo's opinion seems to be, that
Brundusium too had once been inhabited by Cretans, like the Sal­
lentines, and that this portion had migrated from thence to l\1ace­
donia59, This migration is one of those which nre totally incredible,
and which are only meant to indicate the conviction of a national
affinity: that the Calabrians however were foreign invaders, by
whom the Sallentines were expelled from Brundusium, we may·
easily believe. ·
So likewise there may be ground for the tradition, that the ear­
lier inhabitants of Tarentum, on being overpowered by Phalanthus
and his Laconians, had retired to Brundusiurn58• It was from them
that what Tarentum acquired was wrested. After two centuries
and a half, when the Greek city had already grown very powerful,
in 279, it attempted to destroy the towns of the Messapians, and to
reduce the people to servitude. This was the war in which Car­
bina was taken, and such revolting atrocities perpetrated there by
the conquerors 54 : the vengeance of heaven by which so , many
houses in Tarentum are said to have been visited, was that fearful
overthrow whereby its power was ro; a long time broken; ,the most

449' Strabo too reckons thirteen cities in Iapygia, including Brundusium

in the number (v1. p. 281. a.): instead of 7rAnu Tip«-nH I read :irAnV TlfO'iinon
Tarentum cannot be right, since he is writing of the country which lies be­
yond it: ~ II ;;;;, 'TllfP 'I«7rUj-0>V :>c,,;,p« '" 'T. A, · .
50 As the Greeks use tBvor instead of <fp«-'Tpl«-, and indeed expressly
instead of 'fU;\.H: Pollux vm. 111. 'tpl«- ;, ;s,.:iril.A«I (at Athens), eliir«.'Tpiltt.11
j-uop.6po1, l'•p.1oupj-ol. Thus gens triplex at Mantua. Virg. lEn. x. 202.
51 Stephanus indeed has ~«-AAtnl«.: but probably the only ground for
this mention of the place was that some one formerly made the same guess as
I have done.
52 Strabo vi. p. 282. b. 53 Justin 111. 4.
54 Athenoous xn. p. 522. e. f.
1.-P
114 HISTORY OF ROME.

horrible carnage that befel any Grecian army down to that day 455•
It sounds incredible indeed, that the conquerors, in following at the
heels of the flying Rhegians who had fought against them as aux­
iliaries of the Tarentines, should ·have forced their way into Rhe­
gium: but the Messapians were evidently raised on that day from
extreme distress to a greatness they had never expected. Their
dominion must now have extended far into Oenotria; since they
contended with Tarentum for the possession of the Siritis, which
lies so far to the west of it: this must have been after the year 319,
if the mention of Heraclea is to be taken litera,lly*. The Peuce­
tians and Daunians were leagued with the Tarentines against them:
so that it was by the Messapians that the neighbouring tribes were
then filled with jealousy and alarm. By this war their power must
have been destroyed again: but they still continued long to be the
enemies of the Tarentines: which accounts for a prince of the Mes­
sapians being on friendly terms with the Athenians even before the
expedition to Sicily 5a. Thenceforward the Greek city continued
to rise, and the Messapians were no longer her rivals : indeed after
the middle of the fifth century they seem to have put themselves
under her protection by an alliance recognizing their inferiority.
Peucetius is called by the earliest Greek genealogers a brother
of Oenotrus, and his people a colony led· by him out of Arca­
dia57: that is, they adopted the form of a national pedigree, to repre­
sent the Peucetians as one of those old Pelasgian tribes, the pos­
terity of the first men, Pelasgus and Aizeus, which were said to
have issued from Arcadia. According to Pliny 58 the Pcediculians­
such was the Italian name of the Peucetians59-were descended
from nine Illyrian couples.
In..a genealogy by the Pergamene poet Nicander 60 , as to which
however we cannot know whether he did not derive it from an ear­
lier and lost catalogue of the Lycaonids, the two brothers of Peu­
cetius, lapyx and Daunus, accompany him across the Ionian sea
with an army, chiefly of Illyrians 61 , Another story, which like
every thing of the same ki1id is from :i Greek source, brings Daunus
out of lllyria6 ". Now if these views are borrowed from ancient

455 Herodotus V;ll. 170. Diodorus XI. 52.

* S~rabo v1..p; 281. a. 56 Thucydides vu. 33.
57 See p. 20, n. 54. 58 m. 16.
' 59 The simpler forms, Predi and Predici, do not occur in our books.
60 Who, I remark by the way, belongs to the first half of the sixth ce n­
tury of the city, not to the beginning of the next.
61 Antoninus Liberalis fab. 31. 62 Fest. Epit. v. Daunia.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 115

poets and traditions, it is more than probable that they did not
speak of Illyrians, but of Liburnians; who, as has been observed,
inhabited Picenum on the Italian coast, and Corcyra on the oppo­
site side*.
Further traces of the early settlers in the south-east of Italy are
afforded. by the names, Argyrippa and Sipontum: Argos, like La­
rissa, is undoubtedly a Pelasgic name. The legend of Diomedes
having landed there, was current at Arpi, as is proved beyond a
doubt by its coins: and although here again no historical inference
is to be drawn from such a legend, still in this as in all other cases
it is probable, that the places reported to have been Argive settle­
ments founded at the time of the return from Troy, were of Pelas­
gic or1gm. The kingdom of Diomedes is said to have r<iached to
Maluentum, where the head of the Calydonian boar was still shown
in the days of Procopinst; and Maluentum derived its name from
Greeks or Pelasgians 463 • No Hellenic people, so far as we know,
approached nearer to the Pelasgians than the .iEtolians did: and
the relics of the boar, the mention of Diomedes as an .iEtolian
prince 6-', are merely signs of an ..Etolian colony.
But we can by no means conclude from this, that the Opicans,
who are said to have preceded the Sabellians as masters of the
country about Beventum, were these Pelasgians : they were only
the only conquerors. The Daunians however, like Tyrrhenians
and Oenotrians, I account among the Pelasgians : it is a significant
trace in national genealogy to find that the father of Turnus was
called Daunus: their name answers to that of Danaans, and thus
Ardea is said to have been founded by Danaet. This..,.however
belongs to times antecedent to those when the Daunians appear in
history as a part of the Apulians, and when, as Strabo observes, no
difference in language and habits was discernible between them and
the genuine Apulians 65 • These genuine Apulians of Strabo dwelt
to the west of mount Garganus around the bay, in front of which
lie the Diomedean islands 66 • They are the Teanian Apulians of
Plinye1, who speaks of three distinct tribes of Apulians, the Tea­
niaus, the Daunians 68 , and the Lucanians. These last were pro­
* Above, pp. 38, 39. De Bello Gothico 1. 15. p. 349.
· 463 Note 148.
64 This is the more evident, since the legend makes him disappear, and
so lays no stress on him individually. Strabo VI. p. 284. a.
t Note 126. · 65 Strabo VI. p. 285. c.
66 Strabo v1. p. 285. c. and p. 283. c.
67 For here stood Teanum Apulum.
68 Pliny m. 16. Arnnis CerbalusDauniorurn finis: (if so, mount Garga­
116 HISTORY OF ROME.

bably Sabellians who had occupied some towns in Apulia; either

Lucanians, or Samnites; to whom Luceria belonged there: for the
name of Lucanians, may have been a general one for the plantations
of the Samnites. Unless some boldness of divination be allowable,
all researches into the early history of nations must be abandoned:
if I am permitted to use it, liable though it be to grievous ·abuse,
I .will propose the conjecture, that the original Apulians were Opi­
cans by name and descent, who subjugated the Daunians ; and that
the legends about Diomedes, and whatever bore a Greek character
in the arts and manners of the country, continued to subsist under
their government, as similar relics did at Falerii and Ciere. As·
suming a circumstance we find related to be correct, we can hardly
avoid supposing that the Peucetians also had a mixture of Oscan
blood: for the names of the two Peucetians who designed to poison
Cleonymus, Gains and Paulus 469 , are completely Latin.
The Peucetians were divided into thirteen tribes' 0 • They were
governed by a king so late as the beginning of the Peloponnesian
war7 1, Afterward history is entirely silent concerning them, until
about 458, 01. 120. 4; when Agathocles entered into a league with
them and with the lapygians, and promoted their piracies on the
Adriatic' 9 • So thaf at that time they were independent of Rome.
Nevertheless the Roman armies had already entered the land of
the Sallentines : they had done so with hostile purposes in 447;
and in 452 to give protection against Cleonyrnus: in neither expe·
dition, any more than in the war against Pyrrhus, or afterward
when the Messapians and .Sallentines were subdued, is the name
of the Pcediculians mentioned; although the Roman generals must
needs have marched through their country.
Daunia too was under a kingly government, when it joined Ta~
renturn in the war against the Messapians. By the Romans it was
found divided under the sovereignty of a few great cities : and the
discord amongst these affords us an explanation for the otherwise
incomprehensible accounts of the relations between what is repre­

nus would have been situate wholly out of Daunia (lta Apulorum ge.nera
tria: Teani-Lucani-Dauniorum prreter supradicta, &c. .
469 See the treatise mpl Situµ. 0.K.ou~µ. p. 100. a. That these two name11
should occur together, would be a very singular hit of chance. Sylburgius
observes that in the old translation the name of Paulus is wanting: was it struck
out by a theologian? or has it been substituted by a lawyer from conjecture
for a different one?
70 Pliny m. 16. 71 Strabo v1. p. 281. a.
72. Diodorus Exe. u1. 4,
 HISTORY. OF ROME. 117

sented as the whole nation and the Romans. Its most powerful
city was Arpi, which must have possessed a considerable territory ;
since the district of Sipontum was forfeited to Rome as being pub­
lic land of Arpi 478 on account of the insurrection in the second Punic
war. But Canusium also had been great; and her greatness was
still attested by her walls, as that of Arpi was by hers, in the time
of Strabo~
The inscription which has beert published as Messapian, is no­
thing but an old Greek one74, carelessly copied by a person totally
ignorant of the language. That on all the coins throughout lapy­
gia is Greek: w ~ich was also spoken by the nation, the language of
its ancestors having given way for the most part, as it did in Sicily,
to the nobler one. The Canusines, like the Bruttians, spoke Greek,
together with the old dialect of the country75 , The Apulian works
of art, like all in this part of Italy, .have a Greek yet a peculiar
character: the earthen vessels are of a meaner sort both as to their
shape and their paintings : works in bronze have been found of
extraordinary beauty.

473 Livy uxrv. 45.

74 Lanzi, who gives it 11. p. 620, has remarked ,this
75 Horace, Sat. r. 10. 30.

..

 THE GREEKS IN ITALY.

. As Idomeneus and Diomedes were brought by one class of le·

gends to Italy, so were Philoctetes, Epeus, and some of the descend·
ants of Neleus, with Greek warriors and Trojan captives, by others,
which appropriated and devised applications for a variety of ·relics
and monuments. But from none of these pretended settlements did
any Grecian people arise; these Greeks must have been metamor·
phosed and have vanished, like the companions of Diomedes 476•
The most ancient Greek settlement in Italy of which history
takes note, is that of the Chalcidians at Cuma; originally planted
on Ischia and the adjacent small islands7 7, By the Alexandrian
chronologers it was assigned to times of vast antiquity; but assur·
edly this was merely owing to their connecting its founders with
the heroic genealogies. For where they were without any deter­
minate accounts, lilfo those as to the time when the Greek cities in
Sicily were founded, they had recourse to computing by genera­
tions, which pushed the earliest epochs a great deal too far back.
With regard to Cuma they did not find any era; for it had long
ceased to be a Greek city: and when this led them to calculate the
date of its foundation from the genealogies, it came out, contrary to
all credibility, long anterior to the founding of the earliest among
the colonies less remote from Greece. That the leaders of the
emigrants who settled there,· bent their course over unexplored
waters, is intimated by the legend that their ships were preceded
and guided in the daytime by a dove, and at night by the chime of
the mystic bronze: but ev.en from the eastern coast of Sicily, the
first settlement on Ischia would have been a bold adventure. The

476 Quotations, which to have any value should be extremely numerous,

seem to me out of place in this section, with a very few exceptions.
77 Thus Livy (vm. 22.) evidently made a distinction between the Pithe­
cusm and .lEnaria.
 HISTORY. OF ROME. 119

remote age attributed to Cuma is certainly a fiction; but the epoch

of its foundation we have no means of determining.
Dicrearchia, on the hill above Pozzuoli, was a fortified seaport
of the Cumans: if the Samians settled there in the first years of king
Dariusu•, they must have found the spot already inhabited; but
they might be very welcome to the Cumans under the pressure of
the Tyrrhenian war. Parthenope too was founded here by colo­
nists from Cuma. ·
A body of Eretrians established themselves on the islands of
Pithecusre which the Cumans had abandoned; and from them came
the settlers at N eapolis ; its name shows it was a far more recent
city than Parthenope; which was afterward called Palrepolis •. If
the Athenians did actually take a share in the founding of N eapo­
lis, we might have probable grounds for dating it about the time
of the settlement at Thurium79,
Rhegium was planted by the Cumans in common with the Chai-.
cidian colonies in. Sicily, for the sake of commanding the Faro.
It was from thence that Micythus proceeded to found the latest of
the Chalcidian towns, Pyxus, in the territory of Sybaris, which as
then was without a master.
Of the Greek cities in Oenotria the oldest· was Locri; at least
according to the tradition that the first settlers at Syracuse and
Locriaided each other"0 , if Syracuse was really founded thirty years
before Croton61 : so was it according to the indigenous story by
which the arrival of the founders was dated just after the first Mes­
senian war, 01; 14. 1. That is, it was related that the Locrians,
the descendants of those who followed their impious chief, Ajax,
had continued twenty years in the field against Messe.ne as allies
of the Spartans, and that when the boys they had left behind grew
up, they joined their fathers: meanwhile the wives and daughters
had been living in an unrestrained intimacy with their servants.
And when at length the men returned victorious to their homes,

478. In 01. 64. 4 : according to the. chronicle of Eusehius. Perhaps it was

somewhat later, after the death of Polycrates.
79 Their doing so however (Strabo v. 246. a.) seems to be very uncer­
tain. Tzetzes (on Lycophron v. 732.) quotes a story from Ti~reus, thatDio­
timus, the captain of an Athenian ship at the time of the Sicilian expedition,
(01. 91.) offered sacrifice at Neapolis to the Siren Parthenope by command of
an oracle, and established a torchrace there: this event may perhaps in some
way have furnished occasion for the above mentioned improbable statement.
80 Strabo v1. p. 259. b. 270. a. ,
81 Which: is contrary to the legend (Strabo v1. p. 269. c.) that the god
gave Archias and Myscellus their choice between health and riches.
120 HISTORY or ROME..
the women under the consciousness of guilt fled from their wrath
across the sea with their paramours 489 • Though sprung from an
origin so ignominious, that the malir,e of Timreus was raised even
to frenzy by Aristotle's simple account of the tradition, the Italian
Locrians by means of their lawgiver Zaleucus rose to great respect­
ability; and to such prosperity and power, as to found Hipponium
and Medma on th~ other coast; so that they were masters of the
whole country between the two seas, as far as the borders of Rhe­
gium.
The story about the origin of the founders of Locri, and of the
colony which Phalanthus is said to have settled at Tarentum in
01. 18. 1, as well as that about the followers of Theras, induce us
to suspect, that the sons of marriages contracted where no right of
intermarriage existed between the parties, were at that time dis­
turbing the peace of several of the aristocratical republics, and that
measures were taken to send them to a distance. No reflectin'g
person will believe any one of these stories in the literal sense88 :
it would be equally inconsiderate to reject them as utterly ground­
less fabrications.
Tarentum possessed the same rights at Heraclea, which a mother
city would possess in its colonies, and she had at least an equal
share with Thurii in the joint settlement: in Messapia C~lipolis
was probably connected with her; and so was Hydrus, if it was
really a Hellenic town*•
The Achrean cities, Sybaris and Croton, are said to have been
built together, in 01. 19. 284• The former was mistress of the

482 That such was the story, has just been e11tablished by the Excerpt&
from Polybius xu. Tit. de sententiis p. 383. foll. ed. Maii.. Now at last we
·clearly see the meaning of those words in Dionysius Periegetes, v. 366:
"'t•'TEf~' µ1;J:_9on•' ~,..: ...,:,.,,. Eustathius in his commentary does not tell us
what war it was. ·
83 Aristotle assuredly was far from doing this: nor was Timams wrong
in refusing to believe the fact; but what he substituted for it was a scandalous
forgery, with regw:d to which he cannot have been free from guilt. An anti­
quarian indeed, like him, is more likely than others to have valuable insu­
lated pieces of information: such a piece-though subject to limitations, a.s
we learn from the Odyssey-in his remark that in ancient times ll.:Jre were
no slaves bought for money among 'the Greeks. (Athenreus VI. p. 264. c.)
Aristotle would have granted him this, but have answered that the persons
meant in his Locrian tradition were not domestie slaves, but peasants in a
state of bondage. * Scylax p. 5.
84 According to Eusebius. But with regard to all these dates there are
contradictory statements, and we have rather to choose than to decide between
them.
 IIISTORY OF RO:\lE. 121

, country afterward called Lucania, and founded Posidonia and Laos:

the latter, possessing the north of Bruttium, founded Caulon on the
south toward Locri, and Terina on the western coast. Another
body of Achreans, being· invited by the Sybarites, built Metapon­
tum; which by the industrious cultivation of its luxuriantly fertile
territory attained to extraordinary wealth: these three great Achrean
cities, and probably their four colonies, were long united in a league
similar to the one which existed among the Achreans*.
Elea was built by the Phocreans who were flying from Cyrus,
when Sybaris was at the height of her power, on a coast where
they could not possibly have settled without the leave of the Syba­
rites. Elea is remarkable, not for any wars, but for its profound
thinkers, and for the peculiar good fortune which protected it when
the other Greek cities on this coast fell under the power of the
Lucanians. It was the only one that held out between Neapolis
and Rhegium,: the Romans respected it; and the last mention we
find of it is a pleasing one, as the birthplace of the ingenious Sta­
tius. Another earlier body of fugitives from, Ionia, the Colopho­
nians of Siris, seem to have lived in prosperity while under the
protection of Sybaris,,and to have been destroyed after the fall of
their protectress.
The latest Greek colony on this coast was Thurii, a common
settlement of the whole Greek nation, and a city which, though it
did not come up to what Sybaris had been, attained to great emi­
nence and power•. A couple of generations afterward Ancona was
founded further up the Adriatic, either by some Syracusans flying
from their tyrants, or by those tyrants themselves ; who planted
Greek colonies at Issa and Adria, and perhaps at Pisaurum.
The colonists sent out from Greece did not go forth, like the first
New Englanders, with their wives and children, for the sake of
dwelling in freedom amid forests which they had to clear before
them: they were mostly unmarried freebooters, who won them­
selves wives with their swords 485 : so that their posterity were a
mixed race, like the descendants of the crusaders in Palestine and
Cyprus, and those of the Spanish conquerors in America. After­
ward needy Greeks came flocking to countries where an abun­
dance of fertile ground was to be -Obtained; and they were gladly
admitted; but assuredly not to an equality-of rights. They received
allotments of land, but were forced to content themselves with what
lay at a distance: if these new citizens were distributed into tribes,

Polybius 11. 3!). 485 Herod. r. 146.

1.-q
122 HISTORY OF ROME.

their franchise was certainly an inferior one: the pretensions set

up by the Sybarites at Thurii*, which were so absurd under their
circumstances, teach us how their forefathers, who had the power
in their hands, must have dealt with the citizens they received.
The constitution of the Greek cities in Italy as in Hellas was at
first aristocratical: and I think its form may be divined. The de­
scendants of the conquistadores being divided, perhaps into three
tribes, were alone eligible to any magistracy : the remaining Greek
citizens were incorporated into other tribes, and shared the right of
electing to offices, but without being eligible -themselves: in the
city there were a great number of foreign settlers, who were admit­
ted either partially or fully to the privileges of citizenst: the pea­
santry were serfs. That there was a connection between this aris­
tocracy and the Pythagorean religion is unquestionable, though its
nature is mysterious : the three hundred Pythagoreans at Croton
may be conjectured to have been the senate: the revolutions that
broke out in all these cities at the same time, were like those in Ger­
many, between the middle of the thirteenth and that of the four­
teenth c.entury, which spread from town to town, and by which the
government was transferred from the ancient houses to the guilds ;
the cause which led to them being the attempt to retain all the old
institutions unchanged, after they had lost their life and substance.
But the revolutions among the Italian Greeks were savage and full
of horrors and atrocities. Sybaris seems to have become a demo­
cracy .a short time before its fall. The destruction of this extraor­
dinary city, which has incurred o:riprobrium probably unmerited,
and at all events exaggerated, was the first irremediable wound of
Magna Grrecia. It was followed by the bloody revolutions in
which Croton wore itself out: the Lucanians made their appear­
ance and spread over Oenotria. But from the day when the elder
Dionysius entered Italy as a conqueror thirsting for vengeance,
calamities and miseries came upon the Italiots without measure, or
end, or' pause: from that time forth, to use the expression of a
Greek historian, the unfortunate towns of Magna Grrecia were
tossed to and fro by a current from the hands of the Lucanians or
Bruttians into those of the Syracu:;an tyrants, to be laid waste by
the former, or to suffer the ruinous protection of the latter. Which
of these cities were still subsisting, and what was their condition,
when the Romans, coming in the character of protectors, began to
meddle in the affairs of these countries, I shall relate when I reach

* Diodorus xn. 11.

 HISTORY OF 'ROME. 123

that part of my history. In this general survey of ancient Italy, it

seemed to me that a view of their origin ought to be given, and
that a few remarks. on their peculiar character would not be mis­
placed: else their story is partly an independent one, in part belongs
to .the general history of the Greek.nation.
These Greeks, at least in some vf the cities, learnt various things
from the native Italians, who were admitted to their franchise or
who dwelt amongst them; such as their system of weights and of
mensuration 4" 6 , many words of their languages, and even some
forms of their versification and poetry. They on the other hand
diffused their arts and their literature in the peninsula, far beyond
the· countries in their i11;mediate neighbourhood : by the Opicans
the use of their language was adopted even for civil purposes.

486 This was perceived by Mazocchi from the Heraclean tables. But
from the manner of assigning the _territory of Thurii (Diodorus XII. 11.) we
might conclude that the whole principle of the Italian agrarian law had been
adopted: indeed it looks very much as if the ferment at Croton had arisen
from the patricians taking possession of the Sybarite territory for themselves,
without allotting any part to the commonalty.

 . THE LIGURIANS AND VENETIANS.

I UNITE these two nations under one head, not to intimate any
affinity between them, but because both were alike unconnected, so
farat least as we know, with the history of Italy, until the later
times of the Roman republic, and, though they dwelt to.the south
of the Alps, did so only as branches ofnations widely diffused be­
yond the borders of Italy; in very early times too they seem to
have touched in the p~ain of the Po.
The Ligurians are one of those nations which the short span of
our history embraces only in their decline. When Philistus said
the Sicelians were Ligurians, who had been driven southward by
the Umbrians und Pelasgians~• 7 , he was not only blind to the iden­
tity of the Siculians with the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, but was no
doubt equally mistaken as to the extraction of the Ligurians : but
his mistake arose only from the very common source of c;:mfoun<l­
ing two irruptions experienced by the same country at different
times; as the nations that have inhabited Dacia in succession, the
Getes and Goths, the Huns and Hungarians, are taken one for the
other; and in obscure traditions the same people is presented at
one moment as invading, the next as driven out. During his ban­
ishment, which he spent in the countries on the Adriatic, Philistus
m3y have learnt among tlie U mbrians themselves, out of their an­
cient books, that their forefathers and the Siculians had .expelled
the Ligurians out of Tuscany ; nor should his having misunder­
stood what he heard make us treat it with. contempt. Now on this
ground we may build still further; and looking at Livy's account
of the Gauls settling on the Po, notwithstanding the indistinctness
of his conceptions, and the incurable corruptions in the text••, we
may discern thus much: that the Libuans, a Ligurian people, were
once dwelling near the lake of Garda, and that the Salvians, whom

487 Dionysius 1. 22. 88 v. JS: see the commentators.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 125

we know of in the neighbourhood of Massilia, were likewiae dwell­

ing to the North of the Po: whether we suppose they were still
living there as subjects of the Etruscans, when the Gauls made
their appearance; or 1hat here again a people which had long since
retired before the Etruscans, had transferred their name to their
conquerors. The whole of Piedmont in its present extent was in­
habited by the Ligurians : Pavia, under the name of Ticinum, was
founded by a I,igurian tribe, the Lrevians 499• When they pushed
forward their frontier among the Apennines into the Casentino 90 on
the decline of the Etruscans, they probably only recovered what
had before been wrested from them. Among the inhabitants of
of Corsica there were. Liguriansa 1•
Only half of.Ligystica was reckoned to be in Italy. The Sica­
nians, according to a Greek tradition about their origin, were an
Iberian people, who had been driven by the Ligurians from a river
called Sicanus99 , At all events the Ligurians and Iberians were
anciently contiguous; whereas in aftertimes they were parted by
the Gauls. We are told by Scylax, that from the borders of Ibe­
ria, that is, from the Pyrenees, to the Rhone the two nations were
dwelling interrnixedaa: and from this very region does Thucydides
seem to have supposed that the Sicanians had been driven. But it
is far more probable that the Iberians came from the south of the
Pyrenees into Lower Languedoc, as they did into Aquitaine, and
that the Ligurians were driven back by them. When the Celts
long after, moving in an opposite direction, reached the shore of
the Mediterranean, they too drove the Ligurians close down to the
coast, and dwelt as the ruling people amongst them in the country
about Avignon, as is implied by the name Celto-Ligurianso4 , Which
of the tribes among the lower Alps were Ligurian.s, and whether
the Vocontians were so, I have no means of determining. But
from these traces it seems to be extremely probable, that this peo­
ple was dwelling of yore from "the Pyrenees to the Tiber, with the
Cevennes and the Helvetian Alps for its northern boundary.
Of their place in the family ofnations we are ignorant: we only

489 Pliny III. 21. 90 Polybius II. 16.

91 Seneca Consol. ad Helviam, 8. Fragm. Sallust. Histor. II. p. 958. ed.
Cort.
92 Thucydides v1. 2. Philistus in Diodorus v. G. Servius, on JEn. vm.
328, says some take it for the Sicoris, a river in Catalonia: this seems to me
merely a guess.
93 Sey lax p. 2.
94 Strabo 1v. p. 203. a. Instead of Aou1plwroc we must read '11.ov1{.,,o,.
 126 HISTORY OF ROME.
0
know that they were neither lberians nor Celts. Dionysius says,
their extraction was unknown 4 D5 , Cato seems to have made inqui­
ries amongst them, but to have heard nothing beyond stories that
were evidently groundless and clumsily fabricated: hence he stig­
matized them as illiterate, lying, and deceitfol 96 • And illiterate a
people probably was, which had to eke outlife at the cost of such
hard toil, and could not so much as till its stony ground with a
plough. The rest of Cato's rancorous opinion is in no respect
confirmed by other ancient writers: on the contrary they speak
highly of the industry, the indefatigable patience, and the content­
edness of the Ligurians, no less than of their boldness and dex­
terity97. When Cato wrote, the Romans had only just completed
the task of subduing them, which, though the contest was seldom
carried on except by one tribe at a time, had taken forty years :
during this war the inroads of the· Ligurians, like those of their
enemies, had been very desolating and cruel; and he was probably
misled by the exasperation thus produced into pronouncing a sen­
tence so contrary to justice.
At the time when the Ligurians were subjugated or exterminated,
tribe after tribe, or carried away from their mountains to be settled
in far distant plains, the Venetians were as rich as the former were
poor, as un warlike as the Ligurians· were brave. They had resigned
themselves to the protection of Rome without a stri1ggle; and they
appear as her subjects in the Cisalpine war, without our :finding
any account how they became so. They had been led to wish for
foreign protection by the incursions of the Gauls. Their abodes
were in a small part of that region which was afterward called Ve­
netia, in the plain and on the hills, scarcely reaching to the foot of
the Alps, between the Cisalpine Gauls and the formidable Tauris­
cans of Noricum*. The commercial and trading spirit of Venice
is her inheritance from her. parent city, Patavium: which having
been founded, according to tradition, long before Rome by some
Trojan emigrants, escaped uninjured amid all the wars and disor~

495 I. 10. 96 Fragm. Origg. II. in Servius on .lEn. XI. 701. 715.
97 Cicero against Rull. II. 35. Virgil Georg. II. 167. Diodorus IV. 20.
v. 39. From the last but one of these passages it appears that they engaged
themselves for hire as free day-labourers in husbandry. Such freemen who
till the ground themselves, werP called by the Athenians ttv'TOUf)'of. Thucy­
dides J. 141.
Polybius n. 15. 30.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 127

ders of Italy, attained to extraordinary wealth, and in the age of

Tiberius was the first city of Italy next to Rome.
That tradition about Antenor had become nationalized among the
Patavines: at least the account which is connected with it, of the
war waged before the foundrng of the city with the Euganeans am!
their king Velesus• 0•, must be homesprung: else it is manifestly of
Greek origin, being derived from the cyclic poets, who told of
Antenor's treachery and indemnity, and from the name of the· Hene­
tians in Paphlagonia. Many stories, says Polybius, are related of
the Venetians, by the tragic poets 99 • The country about the Eri­
danus, the remotest shores of the Adriatic, were renowned in poet~
ical story: this part of that sea, being inaccessible on account of the
Liburnian pirates, was considered even by the later Greeks as very
distant and vast. Scylax, who enormously exaggerates the extent
of the Adriatic, puts the Venetians on its eastern shore, about the
mouth of the Eridanus; placing that mouth beyond the innermost
recess. of the. gulf, the coast of which, he says, was inhabited by
the Celts 500 • But although these regions were very rarely visited
by the Greeks, still the ·opinion of Herodotus, that the Enetians
were an lllyrian race 1 , well deserves to be weighed: and there is a
statement quite independent of it, which names an Illyrian king
..:Enetus as their prince~.
A difficulty indeed seems to be raised by-our ii.nding that Poly­
bius, who remarks that the Venetians differed but little in customs
and dress from the Celts, though he tells us their language was not
Celtic, does not say it was Illyrian : and yet his ear would un­
doubtedly have been perfectly able to distinguish the lllyrian
tongue. This however leads us to' conjecture, that the name of
lllyrians was erroneously applied to them, and that they may have
been Liburnians: such an inacc.uracy would be a very slight one
for Herodotus. They were only separated from the Liburnians in
Dalmatia by the lstrians, before N oricum was conquered by the
Gauls; and Noricum it is evident had previously been inhabited by
Liburnian tribes. For the Vindelicians were Liburnians 9 : and
Strabo makes a distinction between them and the Breunians and
Genaunians, whom he calls Illyrians". Vi~gil's words too 5 seem

498 Servius on lEn. 1. 243. 9!) II. 17.

500 Sey lax, p. 6. 1 1. 196.
2 In Srrvius on lEn. 1. 243.
3 Servius on lEn. 1. 243. 4 1v. p. 206. b.
5 lEn. 1. 2!3. foll.-Antenor potuit---Illyricos penetrare sinus atque in­
tima tutus Regna Liburnorum.
128 IIISTORY OF ROME.
distinctly to term the Venetians Liburnians: for tlie innermost realm
of the Liburnians must surely be the goal at whieh Antenor is said
to have arrived.
Now the affinity between ·the name of the Ligurians and the
Liburnians is so close, that, although I have not intended to estab·
Iish any connexion between the two nations treated of in this sec­
tion, it might seduce one to make the attempt. I call to mind that
the Sigynnai were the only people on the banks of the lster, beyond
the Venetians and Liburnians, whom Herodotus could hear of,­
which information probably came from Venetian or Liburnian
mariners,-and that he knew this was the name for merchants in
Ligurian 506 : what. if those mariners meant to say that they were
acqu~inted with none but merchants from those parts? and what if
Herodotus designed to intimate this? But I fly from the rocks of
the Sirens.
In an inscription, which is taken for Venetian, the character is
an artificial variety of the Etruscan.

506 v. 9.
 THE THREE ISLANDS.

IN Corsica beside the Ligurians we find Iberians 507 : the Sica­

nians too in Sicily, who were driven back by the Sicelians into the
west and south of the island, are termed Iberians by every histo­
rian•. The only dispute was as to their original home. · They
themselves asserted that they were an aboriginal native race9 : and
Timreus who· sided with them, was deemed by Diodorus 10 to have
proved the point incontrovertibly. Thucydides on the other hand
assures us it was certain, that they had been expelled by the Ligu­
rians from Iberia: and Philistus concurred with him. The posi­
tiveness with which· Thucydides pronounces, " this is ascertained
as truth," hi._ the mouth of such a man, gives great weight to the
traditions of western Europe: it can only have been those of Ligu­
ria or Hispania, that he admitted as decisive. But he too might be
misled by the above mentioned prejudice about national affinities ;
and surely, where the supposed colony is without any similar tra­
dition, the opinion of the people that claim to have given birth to
it, can scarcely be taken as evidence: vanity in such matters is very
apt to give a bias.
On the other hand there is no doubt as to the Sicelians, that they
themselves related they were sprung from the Oenotrians, and had
emigrated from Italy. There were also some Morgetes in the
island11 ; but the more important kindred people is the only one
spoken of in history.

507 Seneca ad Helviam c. 8,

8 Ephorus too wrote that the first inhabitants of Sicily were Iberians.
Strabo VI. p. 270. b. Were not these statements so perfectly trustworthy, it
would be difficult even for such as are cautious in drawing inferences from
the names of nations, not to count it clear that the name of the Sicanians is
one and the same with that of the Siculians,just as the same people were called
both .!Equani and .!Equuli; and that consequently they were of the same race.
9 vI. 2. IO v. 6. . 11 Strabo VI. p.:n-o. b.
I.-R
130 HISTORY OF ROME.

That the Elymians were Trojans, was deemed indubitable; only

there was a tradition by which some Phocians were mixed up with
their progenitors. Hellanicus alone brought thPm from Italy 519•
By the intercouse of the natives with the Sicilian Greeks, and
by whole communities being forcibly transplanted, the Greek lan­
guage became so generally known and so current in Sicily, that
the barbarian tribes entirely forgot their hereditary tongues, and
the whole island grew into a Greek country, as it continued until
late in the middle ages.
In like manner the planting of colonies made Sardinia a Punic
country, in the parts under the dominion of the Carthaginians: after
it had been 180 years under the Romans, this character was still
unaltered, and the civilized Sardinians were considered as Preni 13 •
The ge::mine Sards, who dwelt in caves and clothed themselves in
skins, maintained their footing in the highlands, living in perpetual
feuds with the inhabitants of the cultivated regions. Of these there
were three tribes, the Iolaans or Ilians, the Balarians, and the Cor­
sicans. The name of the first .in the one form gave the Greeks
occasion to invent a stpry of Iolaus bringing his kinsmen the Thes­
piads thither; in the other, to seek here again for a Trojan colony:
the former of these fables was promoted by the Punic colony rever~
ing ~ardus, a son of the Tyrian Hercules, as its founder, and by
Iolaus being connected with Hercules in the Carthaginian mytho­
logy*. The other two names point to the Balearic isles and to
Corsica: and beside this mark of an Iberian population, either pure
or mixed, there was a tradition, among those ~elating to very an­
cient times, of an Iberian colony at N ora1 •. This race may pos­
sibly have becnme extinct in Sardinia : that it should never have
settled on an island which was encircled by the Bale ares, Corsica,

512 Dionysius 1. 22.

13 Cicero pro Scauro 42. Peyr. * Polybius vn. 9.
14 Solinus 13: Dioq. JV. 29: and P.ausanias Phocic. c. xvu: in a prolix
digression about the various settlements in Sardinia; it is the classical passage
for these traditions. His authority was certainly Timreus ; who was also that
of Diodorus, of the book De .Mirabilibus, and even of Sallust: the last was led
to describe this island by the war of Lepidus: he in his turn is followed by So­
linus. It is an instance of the vicissitudes books are subjected to by changes
of fashion and taste, that Timreus, who in the time of Cicero was still gene­
:rally read, was confined to the studies of the learned , when Pausanias wrote;
so that Pausanias could seek in him, as in the most forgotten Atthids, for un­
known narratives to embellish his work with. What lsidorus xv. 6. c. 1178.'
d-f. and Solinus say of Sardinia, with the passage on Corsica which follows
in the former, is now properly inserted among the fragments of Sallust.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 131

and Sicania, is incredible. The Iolaans, we are told by Pausanias,

resembled the Lybians.
The tale of a Greek settlement under Aristmus 515 is again an in­
dication of Pelasgians ; since it was in Arcadia that this son of
Cyrene ruled 18 : Those Tyrrhenians too1 1, who are said to have
inhabited Sardinia before .the Iolaans, were Pelasgians.
I am told that there are Cyclopian walls of a peculiar structure
on this island, which undoubtedly can neither be ascribed to the

Carthaginians nor the the lolaans. Hence we must suppose there

is something more than mere fiction in the story that, toward the

end of the fifth century of the city, Sardinia contained the ruins of

. large buildings and vaults, which the Greeks called the works of

Iolaus and his companions, the Thespiadean Heraclids. 18

If the dialect of the Sardinian mountaineers were kriown, and did
really possess any roots of a peculiar character, it might possibly
throw light on the question whether they are connected with the
Iberians or with the Libyans. The specimens of the language
.spoken in the civilized districts exhibit peculiarities which are
more tqan varieties of dialect : they indicate a Romance language
of a distinct kind; but nothing more.

515 Pausanias, as above. Diodor,us 1v. 82. Auct. deMirabilib. p. 105. b.

Sallust in Servius on Georg. 1. 13. All these however do but repeat the ac·
count of Timreus.
16 The most important passages are collected in Bochart Geogr. Sacr.
ed. 1692. c. 573. d. foll.
17 Strabo v. p. 225. a. .
18 Auctor de Mirabilib. p. 105. b. Diodorus 1v. 30.
 CONCLUSION.

No one can mount up to the fountain-head of those streams by

which the tribes of the present human race have been borne down:
still less can any eye pierce through the chasm, which there severs
that order of things wherein we and our history are comprised, from
an earlier one. That a prior race of mankind has passed away,
is a general popular belief; and it was shared and cheri~hed by the
Greek philosophers : but in one thing they dissented from the peo­
ple: it was supposed by Plato and Aristotle that a few had been
preserved; like embers, from the general ruin, and that from them
a new race of mankind had sprung and spread by degrees over the
desolated earth; while by the people the renewal of the life of man
was regarded as a new creation, as we see in the' Lai of Deucalion,
and.the Myrmidons of .J.Eacus; and the extinct race were, deemed
to have been rebels against the heavenly powers, led astray by the
consciousness of their enormous strength. Thus the later Jews
dreamt of giants before the deluge ; thus the Greeks dreamt of the
Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deu­
calion or of Ogyges: thus the savages of North America fable of the
mammoth, that the world having been laid waste by him invoked·
the lightnings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted
monster, the man of the primitive age. Thus Italy in its popular
legends had the Campanian giants, who fled into the furthest cor­
ner of Messapia, and, being pursued by the inexorable conqueror,
hid 'themselves under the _earth; out of which. venomous ichor
gushes forth, commingling with the springs, from the never-heal­
ing wounds of the thunderbolt. Now far as we are from sharing
such a belief, I still cannot forbear regr..rding the view taken by the
people as sounder in one point than that of the philosophers : the
latter assume a period which has no beginning, and wherein act
follows act; while the people acknowledges the creation of man­
kind as the beginning of new laws of life : ·to set which revolution.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 133

before our eyes, seems to have been the purpose why the organic
remains of earlier periods have been buried in the earth. · There
is no proof that such a creation has occurred only once: it may
have taken place, for the different races of mankind, after the earth
had been more or less extensively desolated, at widely distant
epochs in the course of those many thousand years which have
been requisite to form the alluvial land of Egypt, of llabylonia, of
Lombardy, and of Louisiana : for God does not grow old, nor weary
of creating, of preserving, of remoulding and training.
The uniform notion however was, that the times of the giants
were not parted by a gulf from those of the present human race,
but that the latter gradually gained the upper hand, while the for­
mer expired as gradually. And in fact the supposing that a race
of giants must have been the architects of the walls composed of
enormous polygonal blocks, in what are called the Cyclopian cities,
from Prreneste, and even Ardea, to Alba in the land of the Marsians,
as well as of the walls of Tiryns-which are exactly similar-such
an opinion is an expression of the simple understanding; and in
like manner the peasants in J;riesland fancy they see the works of
giants in those colossal altars which occur on the high grounds in
greater or less preservation, wherever the Teutonic tribes were for­
merly settled, and granite boulders are found.
That these walls are not the works of those tribes which our
history meets with in Latium, inasmuch as they are greatly beyond
their powers, we are certainly forced to pronounce: but we must
cont~nt ourselves with confessing that our history does not reach
back far enough. For the only difficulty is, that the powers of
those tribes were inadequate. The Etruscan walls, and the build­
ings of the Roman kings, do not yield to those works, or even ex­
ceed them in magnitude : the raising and removing the rock-hewn
obelisks was a still more gigantic undertaking, one that mocks our
mechanical powers still more. The Peruvian walls and roads too
are no Jess vast than the Cyclopian buildings: but in these cases
there is nothing incredible; because we know that many thousands,
nay hundreds of thousands, laboured at task work, and that the sae­
-rifice of lives was never thought of. Those forgotten tribes in the
country of the Cascans and Latins 519 , compared with whose archi­

519 Our finding that the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians were employed to build
a fortress on, the Acropolis at Athens, might lead us to conjecture that the
nation enjoyed a peculiar celebrity for this kind of architecture. But no ill'­
ference can be drawn from this with regard to the origin of the walls in La·
ti um; since the people who were allowed to settle at the foot of Hymettus
134 HISTORY OF ROME.

tecture that of Rome under the emperors was diminutive, belong

to or precede that period in which the Greek historian of the Au­
gustan age, agreeing in principle with the philosophical historians
of the last century, conceived that this very country of the Abori­
gines contained nothing but savages scarcely possessing the faculty
of speech, the offspring of the rude young earth. In like manner
the vaulted drains of the lake Copais, which are carried for thirty
stadia thr~ugh the solid rock, and the clearing of which surpassed
the power of Bceotia in the time of Alexander, are certainly the
work of a people prior to the Greeks.
Among the cities of very great antiquity Herculanum is unques­
tionably to be ranked. It was built on a bed of tufo, exactly like
that which has buried it : beneath the former is a soil containing
unequivocal traces of tillage 520 ; and this cultivation belongs to an
age anterior to the first Greek settlement in Italy; since the Greeks
had no traditions of any eruptions from Vesuvius, although they
collected by inference that the.mountain was volcanic.
If a detailed map be framed according to mere reports, calcula­
tions, and bearings, it may deviate in every particular from absolute
geographical correctness, and yet be substantially sufficient to give
a notion of a country, and enable us to follow the events of its
history: when contracted to a small scale, its variations from a
precisely accurate one may be scarcely perceptible.. The same is
the case with regard to many things handed down to us in the his­
tory of nations: if they are detached from their dates and whatever
else is most exposed to arbitrary and falsifying alteration ; and if
we do not suffer ourselves to be disturbed by partial incongruities,
where there is no contradiction in the main ; the limits of universal
history will be greatly enlarged.
Thus the legends and traditions collected in this introduction,
concerning the seyeral tribes that flourished in the earliest times of
Italy, furnish results which enable us to survey the most important
turns of their destinies, and which carry us so far forward, that,
even beyond the Alps, some of the national movements in the west
and north of Europe come within our widening horizon.
The Pelasgians, under which general name it seems that in Italy
the Oenotrians, the Morgetes, the Siculians, the· Tyrrhenians, the
Peucetians, the Daunians, the Liburnians, and the Venetians may

were Epirot Sicilians, and had no connexion with lt.aly, as has been shown
in p. 43.
520 Diss. Isagog. in Herc. \lolumina 1. p. 9.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 135

be comprehended, surrounded the Adriatic with their possessions no

less than the lEgean : that tribe of them which left its name to the
lower sea, having dwelt along its whole coast up a considerable way
into Tuscany, had also a settlement in Sardinia: and in Sicily the Ely­
mians, as well as the Sicelians, belonged to the same stock. In
the interior of Europe the Pelasgians were settled on the northern
side of the Tyrolese Alps; and under the name of Preonians and
Pannonians extended as far as the Danube: that is to say, if the
Teucrians and Dardanians were the same race.
'I:hey are standing in the very earliest traditions at the summit
of their greatness. The legends that tell of their fortunes, exhibit
only their decline and fall: Jupiter had weighed their destiny and
that of the Hellens ; and the scale of the Pelasgians had risen.
The fall of Troy was the symbol of their fate.
As on the east of the Adriatic the lllyrians press forward from
the north, until they are arrested by the mountains of Epirus; so
the Tuscans, being driven onward by the Celts or Germans, come
down from the same quarter out of the Alps into Italy: in the west
of Lombardy they find the Ligurians reaching as far as the lake of
Garda: these at that time were one of the great nations of Europe,
possessing the country from thence to the foot of the Pyrenees; be.
fore this they had also inhabited Tuscany. .They now retired from
the plains on the north of the Po, behind the Ticinus and into the
Apennines. The invaders, pursuing their conquests, expelled the
Umbrians, both out of Lombardy south of the Po, and from the
inland part of northern Tuscany: from the sea coast and the south
of Etruria as far as the Tiber, they drove the Tyrrhenian Pelas­
gians. This limit they reached about the time which we mark as
the first third of the second century of Rome. The impulse of the
Tuscan irruption set in motion all the nations then in possession of
the country from the Po to the summit of the Apennines ; and
forced the Cascans and Oscans, pressed onward by the Sabines,
upon the Sicelians. And as the Pelasgians on the Tyrrhenian sea
were expelled or subjugated, so· their other tribes experienced the
same fate, in Oenotria from the Greeks, in Daunia from the Oscans,
higher up along the Adriatic from the Sabellians and U mbrians :
and the continued progress of the Sabellians subsequently occa­
sioned the Ausonian Opicans to attack the Latins, a people sprung
from an earlier emigration of other tribes belonging to their own
race. The further changes do not require a summary.
PRELIMINARY HISTORY OF ROlVlE.

£NEAS AND THE TROJANS IN LATIUl\L

I Now turn with pleasure toward my proper mark, from the

wearisome task of gleaning detached and mostly unimportant no­
tices concerning the Italian nations; and I retire from the seductive
impulse to divine the nature of what has perished, by continually
renewing the examination of these often uncertain fragments. Yet
l must still linger a while on ground of the same kind with the
most insecure part of what I have just quitted, but ground belong­
ing essentially to Rome, and over which our road must needs pass
to the mythical part of Roman story; a part that must be kept sep­
arate, but may not be excluded.
If the object of an investigation concerning the Trojan colony in
Latium were to decide with historical probability, by means of di­
rect and circumstantial evidence, whether such a colony 'actually
settled on that coast, a prudent inquirer would decline it. He
would deem it absurd to expect any testimonies as to an event five
hundred years antecedent to the time when all" is still fabulous and
poetical i)l the history of Rome: and what traces could have been
preserved, to supply the place of evidence which obviously cannot
possibly exist? when the Trojans with lEneas, even according to
the account which assigns them the greatest importance, were not
an immigrating tribe.such as would alter the people it united with,
and impress its character distinctly on the new formation. In the
earliest Roman narrative they are represented as the crew of merely
a single ship: and even in the later, which might lead us to look
for a somewhat larger number, they are still no more than a small
band, for whom the fields of one village were sufficient. There
 HISTORY. OF· ROME. 137

being no trace of such a settlement to be found in Latium a thou­

sand years afterward, would be no proof against the strangers hav­
ing come thither.
The real object of this investigation is, to determine whether the
Trojan legend is ancient and homesprung, or adopted by the Latins
from the Greeks; and whether there is any chance of explaining
how it originated. Besides it is worth the while to collect the pe·
culiar features of the earliest Roman accounts, which are very little
known.
Let none look on this inquiry with scorn, from thinkl.ng that
Ilion too was a fable, and a voyage into the unknown West was
impossible. It is true, the Trojan war belongs to the region of
fable, so that we cannot select a single point among its incidents as
more or less probable than the rest: yet undeniably it had a histo·
rical foundation. That the Atrida were kings of the Peloponnesus,
is unquestionable. Nor can the voyage to Latiurn be termed im·
possible; since the boldness of mariners is by no means checked
by the imperfect condition of their vessels: nor is their knowledge
of distant regions to be measured by the notions of their country·
men who remain at home, in an age without books, or maps, or
men of learning~ ·
The story that the Trojans were not utterly destroyed at the fall
of Troy, but that a part of them survived, and that this remnant
had been governed by the house of .iEneas, is as old as the Home­
ric poems. True, it does not by any means follow from this, that
the legend which makes the descendants of .iEneas rule over emi­
grants at a distance from Trpy, wa~ equally old; we can only say,
there is no contradiction between the two. All that is expressed
in the well-known passage of the Iliad*, is that a Trojan people
would continue to exist: and it would certainly be more natural to
refer the prophecy to the independent Dardanians under .iEneas,
whose situation would enable them to occupy the desolated .terri­
tory of Ilium immediately after the departure of the Greeks, than
to a distant settlement in regions which, even if they were known
to the mariner, were altogether obscure to the poet; but that Troas
and the Hellespont in the Homeric age had long been full of .iEolian
colonies. Arctinus of Miletus too, a poet contemporary with the
building of Rome, only related, unless the abstracts in the Chres­
tomathia of Proclus are incorrect, that .iEneas and his followers,
being terrified by the portentous fate of Laocoon's children, aban·

. * xx. 307-308.
1.-s
138 HISTORY OF ROME.

doned the city and withdrew from the general ruin to mount Ida.
It is ce.rtainly possible that his account of what afterward befel the
fugitives, might be overlooked in those abstracts. But Dionysius
was acquainted with the poems of Arctinus, and not merely with
his /Etliiopid, but also with. his IJestruction of Troy: for he gives
us his story of the stealing of the false Palladium 521 : and he does
not combine this story with the accounts which stated that the
image had been brought by the 'rrojans into Italy. Now if the
;\1ilesian poet, whose great antiquity Dionysius expressly urges,
had related any thing about a subsequent emigration of .lEneas, it is
inconceivable that Dionysius should have neglected his evidence
for the settling of the Trojans in Italy, when he was amassing all
he could muster out of Hellanicus, Cephalon, and other·writers so
much more recent. ,
In the Laocoon of Sophocles 92 lEneas was represented as retir­
ing before the taking of the city, and as having been followed by
great numbers to new abodes, the desire of many of the Phrygians.
But even if Sophocles took the fable of his tragedy in the main
from the ancient cyclic poet I have been speaking of, still it no way
follows, that he did not in this instance exercise his customary
license, of making a free selection out of the narratives contained
in other poems on the fall of Troy.
Dionysius seems neither to have been acquainted with Pisander,
nor with the lyrical poem of Stesichorus on the destruction of llion.
If credit is due to the account, that Virgil formed the second book
of the .lEneid entirely on the model of Pisander's epic poem 28 , we
then know that the latter sang, how .lEneas after the fall of the city
made his escape with a part of the Trojans, and emigrated; and
that too not as a traitor, rior through the clemency of the Argives:
but we are not warranted in drawing any conclusions· as to a fur­
ther coincider_ce between his story and Virgil's. The age of Pi­
sander, if he was the Camirrean, is quite indeterminate, lying be­
tween that of Hesiod and the thirty-third Olympiad.
Stesichorus however sang of the emigration of .lEneas, almost in
the same way as Virgil; for the representations on the Iliac Table
seem entitled to confidence. · In them we find the hei:o preserving
his father and the holy things,-with but slight variations from

521 1. 69. 22 Quoted by Dionysius 1. 48: ·

23 Macrobius Saturn. v. 2. It is inconceivable that Macrobius should,
as has been conjectured, have taken Pisander of Laranda for older than Virgil:
if here as elsewhere he was merely a compiler, the grammarian he copied
from lived still nearer to the age of Severus.
 HISTORY'OF ROME. 139

Virgil's description,-and embarking with his followers for Hes­

peria. Stesichorus, who died in the fifty-sixth Olympiad, lived in
the latter half of the second century: still from the vague account
of .iEneas leading some Trojans into Hesperia, to that of his found­
ing a colony in Latium, there is certainly a wide step: and it is
very doubtful whether Stesichorus tr.ached this extreme limit. In
Arctinus at least his chief exploit was his saving the Palladium:
among the holy things too mentioned by Stesichorns, this we may
be sure was the most precious treasure: but this Palladium, the
Greeks believed, was preserved 'in the Trojan colony at Siris in
Oenotria; on the same coast where they planted so many persons
connected with Troy, Philoctetes at Petelia, Epeus at Lagaria, the
Pylians at Metapontum. Siris too was within the compass of Hes·
peria; and the first Greeks at all events who sang ofa Trojan emi­
gration to Hesperia, can scarcely have assigned it a more distant
' goal.. But Misenus in Stesichorus, unless his name on the Iliac
Table be an addition inserted out of Virgil, decidedly points to the
lower sea.
The other Greek authorities quoted by Dionysius, we are either
totally unable to arrange according to their age; or we cannot do it
with -such certainty as to fix the time when the Latins were first.
spoken of by the Greeks as a Trojan colony. His trying to up­
hold the historical truth of the legend, by appealing to the Pythian
oracles and the responses of the Sibylline books, is a piece of that
superstitious trifling by which he so often provokes us; and the
authority is quite worthless, since the old Roman Sibylline books
had perished, and those which circulated among the Greeks were
wretched impostures. ·
Gergithes on mount Ida was the only Teucrian town that re·
mained after the .iEolian iiivasion 524 : a Gergithian named Cephalon
wrote the history of his nation. In this he related, that .iEneas had
only led the Trojans as far as Pallene on the coast of Thrace; that
he died there after founding the city of .iEnea; and that Romus,
one of his four sons, built Rome along with his father's followers
in the second generation after the taking of Troy25 • As a Teucrian,
this writer's testimony is very interesting: it would be most im­
portant, if the expression of Dionysius, who calls him "a very an­
cient historian16 ," could be taken literally; but he applies the same
terms to Antiochus, who was more recent than Herodotus. We

524 Herodotus v. 12-2. VII. 43. 25 Dionysius 1. 49. 72.

''"ti'"'"' ,,...vv. I. 72.
~6 ITWVi'f"'P•~,
140 HISTORY OF ROME.

have no right therefore to assume that Cephalon was older than

the former, that is, than the first half of the fourth century.
The existence of other Trojan colonies in those parts was re­
garded by the Greeks of that century as historically certain.
Hellanicus indeed had ma<le the Elymians go over to Cicily from
Italy, and precede the Sicelians as inhabitants of the island527: but
Thucydides, no doubt following Antiochus, states that they were
Trojans, intermixed with some Phocians, who were cast ashore
there on their return from Troy 28 : so Scylax too calls them Trojans.
Hence there can be no question that if Thucydides and the Greeks
of his age had heard tell of a Trojan colony on. the Tiber, they
would not have seen any thing surprising in it.
Within a century of this time Apollodorus of Gela, the contem·
porary of Menander, termed Romus the son of lEneas and Lavinia 2e:
after the mi<ldle of the fifth century Callias adopted the story ~f
the Trojans settling in Latium, and uniting with the Aborigines,
which he indicated by the marriage of Roma with king Latinus• 0 •
Soon afterward Pyrrhus crossed over into Italy, and the eyes of
all nations were turned toward Rome. The notion· entertained
by Pausanias, that Pyrrhus felt himself called upon as a descendant
of lEacus to wage war against the posterity of the Trojans•i, was
very probably borrowed from some contemporary writer: from
Hieronymus or Timreus. The latter, who wrote, that the people
of Lavinium had told him, the images of the Trojan gods were
preserved in the sanctuary of their, 'temple32 , mantained that the
Trojan origin of the Romans was positively certain: and in en­
deavouring to get evidence of it he was deluded by that fancifulness
which often visited him, into imagining that the sacrifice of the
October horse was a memorial of the destruction of Troy by the
wooden horse 88 • From that time ~orward the belief in the Trojan

527 Dionysius 1. 22. It seems also as if he had not conducted the Trojans
under JEneas beyond the country of the Crusreans in Pallene, that is, to the
town of lEnea. See Dionysius 1. 48.
28 Thucydides VI. 2. Scylax p. 4. The same singular story of an am­
icable settlement in which the fugitives unite with the conquerors humbled
by their destiny, occurs at Siris on the coast of Oenotria.
29 In Festus v. Romam: the words are sadly corrupt.
30 Dionysius 1. 72. 31 ;rausanias Attic. o. xu.
32 Dionysius 1. 67.
33 That this notion, which we' were acquainted with,through Plutarch,
Qurest. Rom. c. 97, and Festus, v. October equus, owes its origin to Timreus,is
clear now from the Excerpta de sententiis p. 381. ed. Maii, where Polybius's at­
tack upon him is published in a state very much fuller than in the old editions :
 HISTORY OF ROME. 141

col,ony was quite universal among the Greeks. In the first half of
the next century it was professed by Eratosthenes 53• : it is by mere
accident that we have no Greek work in which it is expressed,
more ancient than Lycophron'11 Cassandra, which was, written
about 560 35•
But along with this there was another legend current among the
Greeks : that the Latins were one of the ancient colonies founded
in various places by Greek castaways after the Trojan war; which
colonies they supposed to have afterwards lost their connexion with
their mother-country, and to have been estranged from it: to this
class, in the south of Italy, the first city of Metapontum, Petelia,
and Arpi, were supposed to belong. Circeii, which was uniformly
taken by the Greeks for the island of Circe, and hence a place of
interest even to mariners, who recognized the grave of Elpenor in
a place overgrown with dwarf myrtles (whereas the rest of Latium
was said to produce only standards 36) brought the name of Ulysses
into these parts. Hesiod terms Latinus and his brother Agrius,
the sons of Ulysses and Circe, and the sovereigns of the renowned
Tyrrhenians 37, He. makes no mention of Telegonus, who was
p.amed in the l'OOlll of those brothers in Other fables ; fables anterior
to Sophocles*, and adopted by the later Roman poets and by the
Tusculans. Wherever Latinus, or Romus, or Roma, are spoken
of as descended from Ulysses or Telemachus38 , the meaning of the
· fable is the same: but this notion of a Greek origin is likewise
found without any mention of Ulysses, Aristotle related 39, that
some Achreans .on their return from Troy had been cast by tempests
on the coast of Latium, a district of Opica; that, when they landed

&«l µh (read µnr) b 'Toi, 'll'<fl 'TOU Ilvppw 7rtb.H (perhaps 7TOA,µov) ~~<Tf
Tou' p.,µ11.fou, ;'T, (insert ,.11.l) riiv ri7roµ1nµ11. 'ITOIOvp.hov, 'Tii( &11.'Tcr. 'TO ~JA101
d.71'0tAef«, t1 Hµ.ipr- rr1v' &d.'f'ctJC.QVT;~"' i7l'11'01 7roA1µ17rrffv 7Tf.o fTi;t wOA'"'' ;, rr~
&d.µ7r'!' .1<1t.Mvµiv'f', J111. 'TO 'Tii' Tpof11.g 'TH1 ,tMl•<T" 1111. 'TDV i7r7ro1· )·tri<T811.1
"Tor lo6p101 7rfO<Ttt.')-op1uoµevov. Plutarch, when recording this ingenious ex­
planation as it was delivereg by its authors;writes that the Romans would do
this as Tpr.O.,v i'YA"" "'"'" µ1µ1/'µivcr. 1ftt1<Tl Att'Tfv.,,: so that he probably
found this line in Timreus, and it must then belong to a poet who, compara­
tiv~ly speaking, was of considerable antiquity. .
534 Servius on lEn. I. 273. '
35 v. 1232. foll. The author'has discussed the age of Lycophron in his
KleinB Schriften p. 438-451. ·
36 Theophrast. Hist. Plant. v.,9. Scyla.x, p. 3.
37 Theogon. v. 1011-15.
* See the passages quoted among the fragments of the Nl7r'Tf«.

38 See the latter part of the section on the founding of Rome.

39 In Dionys. 1. 72.

 142 HISTORY OF ROME.

to winter there, the captive Trojan women set fire to their ships ;
and that this compelled them to settle in those parts. The same story
was repeated by Heraclides Lembus so late as after the year 600;
and all who before the sixth century called Rome a Grecian city,
and the Romans Greeks, must have adopted views substantially the
same.
Now it seems clear to me, that the earliest Greek tradition, of
which we may certainly consider Hesiod as the representative, by
assigning Latium to Ulysses and his descendants, excludes the
Trojans from it: while a very ancient opinion, the histbrical value
of which I may leave to rest on its own merits, brought them along
with the sacred treasures they had saved, to the Siris. If so, there
is a very great probability, that, so long as the Palladium was be·
lieved to be preserved there, that is, until the taking of Siri.s ·.by
the Ionians, about the year 75, nothing was either said or sung
among the Greeks touching a more distant migration of those who
had escaped from the flames of Ilion. But irreplaceable sacred
treasures, such as the Palladium, if they are lost, are generally
given out to have returned to light somewhere else: and then it
often happens tha~ several are· set up as the true one. Thus a
favourable hearing might be won for the legend, that .£neas had
taken refuge with the gods of Troy' in parts far mdre remote than
the Siris, where they were still preserved: but to a Teucrian~ the
report was most acceptable, and he would feel a peculiar interest
in strengthening the opinion; that a germ of ·his race had taken
root in a distant region, and that a new people was springing up
from it.
In that distant region however must the report have had its rise :
for whatever use learned Romans in the age of Augustus ·might
make of Greek poets, to show that the tradition was early known·
to the Greeks, and thereby to establish its truth; still it would be
· extremely improbable that a belief which was adopted by the whole
nation concerning its own origin, should have been borrowed from
abroad; even if it could be traced from such poems as were gene­
rally known. This however is by no means the case here,' as it is
with the fable of Ulysses coming to Latium: the latter, it is very
easy to see, was fostered by the circumstance that the house of the
Mamilii, which was transplanted to Rome from Tusculum, where
they had been princes, deduced its lineage through Telegonus from
Circe. Above all is it improbable that a belief of this kind should
be of foreign origin, when it is re.cognlzed by the state; by, a state
too so proud, and so contemptuous toward every thing foreign, as
 HISTORY OF ROME. 143

Rome. Of its having been so recognized we find remarkable proofs,

in collecting the earliest traces of the Trojan legend among the
Romans; proofs drawn from times when Greek literature had cer­
tainly not found admission except with a few individuals.
To the opinion that this legend was generally pi:ernlent among
the Romans, it might be objected that of all the Roman festivals
not one related to lEneas and Ilion. For though a yearly sacrifice
was offered by the pontiffs and the consuls on the banks of the
Numicius to Jupiter lndiges 540 , this no way proves that the notion
of this god being, lEneas deffied, was of any high antiquity. But
ort the other hand the worship of the Penates at Lavinium is of the
greater importance, because, as has been more than once mentioned,
Timreus, who at all events writing for Sicelian readers could not
invent fables on Roman matters, as Megasthenes did concerning
India, related, about the year 490, that he had been told by certain
inhabitants of Lavinium, there were Trojan images of clay pre­
served in their temple.
The first transaction between the Romans and the states, of
Greece, that we have any account of, is the application of the
senate to the lEtolians for the freedom of the Acarnanians, grounded
on. the plea that the Romans were bound to protect those wh9se
ancestors, alone of all the Greeks, had. taken no share in the war
against their progenitors the Trojans 41 , Owing to Justin's super­
ficial inaccuracy our means for determining the time of this event
are in such confusion, that we canno't make out whether this em­
bassy was not sent even before 509; it must not be dated later than
515 or 516. It was about· the same time that the senate wrote a
letter to king Seleucus, demanding, as the condition of entering
into a treaty of friendship and alliance with him, that the llians,
the kinsmen of the Roman people, should be exempted from tri­
bute49. The llians were also included by the Romans in their first
treaty of peace with Macedonia, in the year 549 :' fifteen years
after, when the Scipios crossed the Hellespont, the Ilians boasted

540 The Veronese Scholiast on 1En. I. 260.

41 Justin xxvm. 1. 'When my history reache~ this point, I think I shall
be able to show that the circumstances related by Dionysius in 1. 51, which
refer still more specifically to the legend of lEneas, belong to this negociation,
not to a much later period.
42 Suetonius Claud. c. 25: where that excellent critic, Oudendorp, has
proved that Seleucus, who is there named without any specific epithet, must
have been Callinicus, who reigned after 509, OJ. 133. 3. The cause that led
him to seek the friendship of Rome, was his war with Ptolemy Euergetes, or
that with Antiochus Hierax. '
 144 ~!STORY OF ROME.

of their affinity with the Roman people, calling them their colony;
the Romans were delighted to see their mother country, and the
consul went up to the citadel to offer a sacrifice to Athene 548 , It
would be useless to collect later instances of the llians appealing
to this pretended affinity; an appeal made dishonestly, for, they
were originally au lEolian colony, and the Macedonian kings, who
at one time enlarged the city, at another changed its site, mixed up
a concourse of people from various nations with the old inhabitants'*.
The traces that remain of C. Nreviu!c', who had served in the first
Punic war, having given a circumstantial description in his poem
of the departure and voyage of ~neas and his father, will be found
collected a couple of pages further down.
By this combination of evidence I think I have established the
correctness of the view, that the Trojan· legend was not brought
into Latium by Greek literature, but must be considered as home·
sprung: and when I have added, that in spite of this it has not the
least historical truth,-any more than the descent of the Goths from
the Getes, or that of the Franks and Saxons from the Macedonians,
all which are .related with full faith by native w,riters,-nor even
the slightest historical importance, I should wish to quit the sub·
ject. But he who brings forward inquiries of this sort, is seldom
permitted to decline expressing his suspicion, if he has one, even
where no human sagacity can arrive at a decisive solution; as on
the question what after all can have been the origin of this tradition.
The following hypothes~s is with me' not a desperate attempt to
find some escape or other from a difficulty: it is my conviction:
yet without that necessity o( speaking, I should be silent on the
subject.
· Every thing we have to, build upon in the old mythological
stories, with a view to discovering the affinities of nations, indicates
that which existed between the Trojans and the Pelasgian tribes;
the Arcadians 44, the Bpirots45 , the Oenotrians"'6, but more e1.1peci­
ally the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. Dardanus comes from the city of
Corythus to Samothrace, and from thence to the Simois: Corythus
in Virgil is a Tyrrhenian, according to Hellanicus and Cephalon a

543 Livy XXIX. 12.. XXXVII, 37. XXXVIII. 39. Justin XXXI. 8. Polybius
XXIII. 3. . ' · '
" i;!cylax, p. 35. Strabo xm. p. 593. foll. .
44' Dardanus according to one tradition is sprung from Arcadia (Diony•
1ius 1. 68.): .lEneas arrives in Arcadia.
45 Helenus settles, and .lEneos stays in Epirus.
46 Polieum on the Siris is built by the Trojans.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 145
Trojan547: this interchange, the expedition of the Trojans to J,atium
and Campania, and the wanderings of the Tyrrhenians to Lemnos,
Imbrus, and the Hellespont, may safely be interpreted as designat­
ing nothing more than national affinity. That the 'Penates at La­
vinium were the gods of Samothrace, was an opinion almost uni­
versally received: so much so, that Atticus, though he did not
controvert the story about the migration of ..iEneas, concluded that
the Penates had been brought from that island 48 : so much so, that
the- Samothracians, like the Ilians, are said to have been recognized
as the kinsmen of the 'Roman people 49 : which statement must refer,
not merely to a belief entertained by individuals, but one declared
by the government. From this community of religion as of lineage
it might ensue, that more than one branch of the nation should call
themselves Trojans, and boast of being a· colony possessing the
'frojan sacred treasures, rescued by them from destruction. For
many generations after they had bowed under the yoke of the bar­
barians, Tyrrhenians would still visit. the holy land of Samothrace;
and there Herodotus may have heard citizens of Cortona and Placia
converse; there Lavinians and Gergithians may have mutually
awakened and ~trengthened the conviction of their kindred through
their common ancestor ..iEneas. The superiority maintained by
the religion. of the Tyrrhenians and by the arms of the Cascans
when the two nations united, is implied in· the line
Sacra Deosque dabo,; socer arma Latin us habeto ~

only that Latinus himself is to be considered as a Tyrrhenian.

The Trojan descent of the Elymians is no less decided and ac­
knowledged 'than that of those in Latium: so is that of the ancient
Sirites of P.olieum. · · · ·
A belief of this sort does not req~ire long to become a national
one, in spite of the most obvious facts and the clearest historical
proofs; and then thousands would· be ready to shed blood for it.
They that would introduce it, need but tell people roundly, that it
is what their forefathers knew and befo~ved, only the belief was
neglected and sank into oblivion.
The legend was altered in a v~riety of ways: even imperfect
traces of its earliest form, before, like others, it experienced the
fate of being adulterated into a tale of something historically possi­
ble, demand a place in a history of Rome.

547 Parthenius, 34. 48 Schol. Veron.' on lEn. 11. 717.

4!) Servius on lEn. 1m 12.
J.-T
 HISTORY OF ROME.

Nrevius had related it in an episode of his poem on the Punic

war, of which fragments and notices are preserved 550 • It is evident.
that here too, as in Arctinus and Sophocles, Anchises and JEneas
quitted the.city before it was taken: their wives passed through
the gate in the night, with their heads muffled, in tears: many fol­
lowed their example: yet JEneas found .room for his train in a
single vessel, which Mercury had built for him •. The mention of
Prochyta shows that the Campanian poet accompanied the emi­
grants to the term of their voyage: the vicissitudes which Virgil
makes them pass through before they reach it, seem in the main to
be borrowed from Nrevius. We know that the tempest, which
here too assuredly was raised by Juno, the complaint of Venus to
Jupiter, and the promises of the future with which he consoles. the
fond goddess, were imitations of Nrevius: I have no doubt that he
likew.ise brought JEneas to Carthage ; from him comes the name
of Dido's sister, Anna; it must certainly be the Punic princess, ~ho
in him too "gently and prudently inquires in what manner JEneas
left Troy:" and it is exceedingly probable that the origin of the
national enmity had already been deduced by him from her fate •
.The shield of JEneas is a fiction which might c_ertainly be readily
suggested by that of Achilles: still it is at least likely, that the
shield representing the war of the giants in the poem of Nrevius,
was an earlier similar apI>lication of the Homeric conception to the
same hero.
In Varro's story the different parts bore the mark of sources and
times totally different. Of a novel kind are the escape of JEneas to
the citadel, and his being allowed by the capitulation to depart with
as much as every man can carry 51 ; whereupon instead of his treasures
he bears off his father who had been paralysed. by lightning, and,
when the Greeks in .admiration of the deed grant him a second
choice, the clay and stone images of the gods; in honour of which
virtue they permit· him· to take away whom and what he will in

550 The fragments here referred to.m11.y be found in Hermann's E!~menta

doctr. metricm m. 9. 31. p. 629. foll. '

l Amborum uxores noctu Troia. de (read Troia.d) exiba.nt

Capitibus opertis, flentes, , .

Abeuntes ambm lacrimis cum multis.

2. Horum sectam sequuntur multi mortales.

3. -bla.nde et docte percontat,

lEneas quo pacto Troiam urbem liquerit.

• 51 Dionyeius mixes up thie story with that of Arctinua. ,

 HISTORY ·oF ROME. 147

r;afety 551 • A feature belonging to the ancient legend, -and reminding

us of those of Asia, is, that the morning star continued visible to
the Trojans all day long during the voyage, and disappeared when
they had reached their destination on the Laurentine shore 53• It is
not known who was the author that assigned four years for the
duration of this voyage 54• By the sign just mentioned, and by the
fulfilment of the Dodonrean oracle55, when his hungry band were
devouring the herbs on which they had spread their scanty meal,
...Eneas recognized the land allotted to him by fate 56 • According to
Cato, ...Eneas and Anchises (~or he also reached the promised
land), gave the name of Troy 5 7 to the first settlement, which did
not stand where Lavinium was afterward built. Henceforward
we may discover traces of the account such as it stood in the Ori~
gins. Latinus granted 700 jugers to the Trojans: here the measure
of a plebeian hide of land is traced back io the very first origin of
the Latin nation; and it is intimated that there were but a hundred
Trojans. The harmony between the natives and the strangers was
disturbed by the wounding of a favourite stag belonging to king
Latinus. Turnus 58 , prince of the Rutulians of Ardea, united his
arms with him against the hated foreigners. But the natives were
defeated, Lauren tum was taken, Latin us fell at the· storming of the
cita<lel59, and Lavinia became the prize of the conqueror.· As the

552 Servius on lEn. II. 636: and the Veronese· Scholiast on lEn. II. 717,
where we should read humarw.rum for historiarum, and aurum for arma.
53 Servius on lEn. 1. 381. and II. 801. 54 Servius on lEn. 1. 259.
55 Servius on lEn. m. 256.
56 This oracle is known to Lycophron: v. 1250. foll.
57 Servius on lEn. 1. 6. VII. 158. ·
5~ His name is nothing else than a. La.tin form of Tyrrhenus : see above
p. 43: and the readings of the V~tican manuscript show that Dionysius, 1. 64,
called him TuppHvoc, as in 1. 70 he did the shepherd Tyrrhus. Here again we
have the same duplicity introduced into the notion of the mythical ages, the
Tyrrhenians and Trojans combating each other, as the Tyrrhenians and Pe­
lasgians, the Pelasgians and Sicelians did in different legends. That Turnus
in the name of Turnus Herdonius is a. Latin promome:n, is any thing but cer­
tain : the practice of placing an uncommon cogrnnne:n before the 7Wmen ob­
tained early; and Turnus would be like Sicu)us, or Auruncus, by the side of
very old Roman names in the Fasti.
59 This story must sound so strange to the reader of the lEneid, and it
must seem so incredible that Virgil should thus have altered the old tradition,
that I transcribe the passages quoted from Cato; they are all preserved by
Servius; on lEn. iv. 620. Cato <licit juxta Laurolavinium cum lEnem socii
prmdas agerent, prrelium commissum, in quo Latinus occisus est, fugit Tur.
nus.-on I. 267. Secundum Catonem-lEneam cum patre ad Italiam venisse,
f't propter inva.soa agros contra Latinum Turnumque pugnasse, in quo prmlio
148 HISTORY OF ROME.
picture was drawn in gentler ages, we find nothing of these un­
happr nuptials with the man by whose arms her father fell, and
the marriage is combined with festivities fo honour of the peace:
although Virgil does not allow himself, like Dionysius and Livy,
to make the threatened battle go off in an alliance .and union. And
certainly Lavinia in other traditions also is the mediatress of an
alliance :with foreigners; being married to Hercules, under the name
of Launa, the daughter of Evander; to Locrus, as Laurina, the
daughter of the Oenotrian king, Latinus; nay £neas himself mar­
ries her, under the name of L::gma, the daughter of Anius king of
Delos*.
The coast· of Latium is a sandbank, where nothing grows hut
wood of t~e fir kind; and. £neas might well be grieved that his
fate had orought him to so poor a country560• But he was reminded
of the oracle, that his colony; should be guided, like the Sabellian, by
an animal to its promised seat, when the pregnant s.ow that had been
designed for a sacrifice, broke loose, and escaped. to the bushes on
a more fruitful eminence. There it farrowed. thirty young ones;
and thus not only signified the site on which. Lavinium was to be
built, but also the number of years that was to elapse before Alba
should become the capital in its ste,ad, as well as the number of the
Latin townshipse•,
At the founding of Lavinium the Gods gave signs of their pre­
sence. The forest which occupied the site of the future city,
caught fire of itself: a wolf was seen 'bringing d:i-y pieces of wood
in his mouth to feed the flame; an eagle (anned .it with his wings.
But there came also a fox, that had dipped his tail in" water, and
tried to extinguish the fire: and it was .with difficulty that the two
former, after driving him several times away, were able to get rid
of him. This implied that the people whose mother city was
building, would have hard work to establish their power against its
obstiQ.ate adversaries. Bronze images of the three fated ani1X1als
were set up in the market place of Lavinium 61 • · ·

·The poetical story now passes over centuries .to the epoch of the
Etruscan dominion in Latium: and it was not so careless ·as we
'

periit Latinus.-on rx. 745. Si veritatem historire requiras, primo prcelio in-·
teremtus est Latinus in arce.
* Dionysius 1. 59,
560 In agrum macerrimum littorosissimumque. Fabius Maximus in Ser­
vius on lEn. 1. 3.
61 The latter in Lycophron also 1253-1260.
62 Dionysius 1. 59.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 149

might 'be inclined to think it, when, knowing nothing of the Greek
chronology, it brought the building of Rome very near the time of
JEneas. ·
_Turnus on his defeat fled for succour to l\Iezentius, the Etrus­
can .king of Coore, being ent,itled to require it from him, as from his
superior lord, to whom the Rutulians paid the first-fruits due to the,
gods: others say this was the price they gave. for his assistance• 0•.
With this overpowering enemy JEneas, as king of the whole Latin
. nation, fought on the N umicius; Turnus fell, but the Latins fled;
1Eneas plunged into the stream, and was never. seen more: his
spirit, being purified from.earthly cares and exalted to divinity, was
adored as Jupiter Indiges: and so long as a recollection of the an­
cient rites was preserved, · the Roman consuls went every year
with the pontiffs and offered sacrifice to him on the banks of this
river 114• After this battle Lavinium was closely besieged and re­
duced to despair; until Jupiter accepted a vow of dedicating the
produce of the next vintage 65 to him: for the whole produre of, the
vineyards was demanded by the tyranny of Mezentius, or their
first-fruits by his impiety, as the indispensable condition of peace.
He fell by thE! hand.of lulus-Ascanius was not introduced till late
and out of Greek books-and the descendants of lEneas became'
lords of Latium.· ,
"
These wars .are described by Virgil, who softens .whatever is
harsh in them, and alters and accelerates the succession of events,
in the latter half of the 1Eneid, Its contents were certainly na­
tional; yet it is scarcely credible that even a Roman, if impartial,
should have received any genuin~ enjoyment from• his story. To
us it is unfortunately but too apparent how little the poet has suc­
ceeded in rais.ing these shadowy names, for which .he was forced
to invent characters', into living beings, ,like the heroes o( Hom~r.
·Perhaps )t is a :problem that defies solution, to form an !!pie poem
out of an argument whjch has not lived for centuries in popular
songs and .tales as the common. property of a nation, so. that. the

5G3 Here again there is a great fluctuation in. the story, According to
Verrius Flaccus (Fasti Prrenestini a. d. 1x. Kai. Mai.) Mezentius took all
the wine for ever as the price of his aid: in Ovid (Fast. 1v. 879. foll.) the
ground for the tax is the same, but he limits it to half the produce: Cato in
Macrobius, m. 5, says it was an act of impiety, not of rapacity: to the lattel'
the first-fruits offered to the gods would have been an insignificant object.
G4 Schol. Veron, on JEn. 1. 2GO. I I

65 The variations in Macrobius and Ovid, and the atf.f'mpts of Dionysius

to give a historical colouring to the affair, it would be idle to repeat.
150 HISTORY OF ROME.

cycle of stories which comprises it, and· all the persons who act
a part in it, are familiar to every one. Assuredly the problem was
beyond the ability of Virgil, whose genius wanted fertility for crea­
ting, great as was his talent for embellishing. That he himself
was conscious of this, and was content to be great in the way
adapted to his endowments, is proved by his practice of imitating
and borrowing, and by the touches he introduces of his exquisite
and extensive erudition, so much admired by the Romans, and now
so little appreciated. He who puts his materials together elabo­
rately and by piecemeal, is aware of the chinks and crevices, which
varnishing and pvlishing conceal only from the unpractised eye,
and from which the work of the master, when .it issues at once
from the mould, is free. ' Accordingly Virgil, we may be sure, felt
a misgiving, that all the foreign ornaments with which he was
decking his work, though they might enrich· the poem, were. not
his own wealth, and that this would at last be perceived by pos­
terity. When we find that, notwithstanding this fretting conscious­
ness, he strove, in the way that lay open to him, to give a poem,
which he did not write of his own free choice, the highest degree
of beauty it could receive from his hands ; . that he did not, like
Lucan, vainly and blindly affect an inspiration which nature had
denied him; that he did not allow himself to be infatuated, when: he
was idolized by all around him, and when.Propertius sang:
Yield, Roma.D. poets, bards of Greece, give way,
The Iliad soon shall own a greater lay ;
that, when the approach of death w~s releasing him f~om the fetters of
civil observances, he wished to destroy what in those solemn moments
he could not but view with melancholy, as the 'groundwork of a
false repu~tion; we feel that this' renders him worthy of our esteem,
and ought to make Ui! indulgent to all the weak points of his poem.
The merit of a first attempt does not always furnish a'. measure of
a writer's talents: but Virgil's first youthful poem shows that he
cultivated his powers w'ith incredible industry, and that no faculty
expired in him through neglect. But it is wherever he speaks
from the heart, that we perceive how amiable and generous he was:
not only in the Georgics, and in all his pictures of pure still life; in
the epigram on Syron's villa: the same is no less visible in his way
of introducing those great spirits that shine in Roman story.
 . '

ALBA.

WHEN Jupiter in the lEneid is consoling the weeping godde1Ss,

.the mother of the hero, by revealing the future to her; and telling her
how the empire of her.son and. his posterity was to mount from
step to step, increasing in glory and greatness, up to Rome, to
which no limit and no term was assigned 588 ; the three years which
he promises for lEneas, refer, not to the interval between his land­
ing and his death, but to the duration of the little Troy on the La­
tian shore, until the two nations united and built Lavinium: though
the former period was also reckoned at the same number of years.
Thirty years afterward his successor led the. Latins from the
unhealthy low grounds on the coast to the side of Monte Cavo,
from the summit of which the eye commands a view more ample
than the dominion of Rome before the Samnite wars: in the light
of the setting sun it can reach Corsica and Sardinia, and the hill
which is still illustrated by the name of Circe, looks like an island
beneath the first rays of her heavenly sire. The site where Alba
stretched its long street between the mountain and the lake, is still dis­
tinctly marked: along this whole. extent the rock is cut away under
it right dowJ;J. to the lake. These traces of man's regulative hand
are more ancient than Rome. The surface of the lake, as it has
been reduced by the tunnel, now lies Car below the ancient city:
when Alba was standing, and before the waters swelled to a ruin·
ous height in consequence of some obstructions in the outlets, it
must have lain yet lower; for in the age of Diodorus and Diony·

'566 · JEn. 1. 261_:_279, It seems however as if three thousand years were

allotted to Rome: which, according to Servius on JEn. in. 284, was one of
the many periods assigned for the length of a great year : from a rough calcu­
lation about the periodical revolutions of' the heavenly bodies this was sup·
posed equal to a hundred times that of Satnrn. This statement has certainly
some foundation, though the reference to Cicero'• books de natura Deor>Lm
rests on an oversight.
152 HISTORY OF ROME.

sius*, during extraordinary droughts, the remains of some spacious

buildings might be seen at the bottom, and the common people took
them for the palace of an impious king which had been swallowed
upt. Above the steep rock there was no need of a wall: the ap­
proaches on both sides might easily be barred. Monte Cavo was
the Capitoline hill of Alba; its summits required to be fortified, to
secure the town from above: and there is great probability in the
conjecture, that, as the citadel at Rome was distinct from the Capi­
toline temple, so the Rocca di Papa was the citadel of Alba.
This account concerning the origin of Alba stands and falls with
the Trojan legend: another tradition, according to which Lavinium
was founded by the Albans, in union with the Latin n11tion, has
been obscured by it, but may still ·be recognised. A recollection
was preserved among the ·Lavinians, that their city had been built
under the sovereignty of Alba by siX hundred families sent out for
that purpose 56 7, • The legend which tries to combine the two sto­
ries, is by no means ·an innocent poetical fiction; but was fabricated
with the express view of making out that Lavinium was the earlier
seat of the Penates. It states, that :Ascanius carried away these
gods with him, when he and all ·his people left Lavininm: but as
the images departed twice over from their new temple after its
doors had been closed, and returned to the forsaken 'one in the
desolate city, the Alban king yielded, and sent the settlers to take
up their dwelling round the sacred place.
I am not offering a hypothesis, but the plain result of unpreju­
diced observation, when I remark that Lavinium, as its name im­
plies, was the seat of congress for the Latins, who were also called
J,avines: .just as Panionium was that for the lonians ,in Asia.
When a legend contains names supposed to have belonged to indi­
viduals, this goes far toward giving it the look of being something
more than a fiction': hence mariy who othef'wise might still insist

. * . Dionysius 1•.71. .
t A similar legend is still current in the neighbourhood of Albano : its
outlines, 8s it was related to one of the translators by a peasant boy ~ho
guided him to Frascati, are as follows. Where the lake now lies, there once
stood a great city. Here,. when Jesus Christ eame into Italy, he begged
alms. None took compassion on him b~t an old woman, who gave him two
handfuls of meal. He bade her leave the city: she obeyed: the city instantly
sank, and the lake rose in its place. To set the truth of the story bey<md dis­
pute, the narrator added, Sta scr itto nei libri.
5G7 Dionysius 1. G7. · 'EZ"'''"''' f<l~eJ',,,..J ""'' itf"'' d.uToi; P,n«.r11.vT,;.n1;
·~ltr'fiOl,.
 111$TORY OF R0~1E. 153

that the Trojan legend ought not to be absolutely rejected, may

perhaps change their views when it becomes clear to them that
Lavinia and Turnus are only personifications of two nations, and
that Lavinium is a more recent city than Alba. The same unpre·
ju<liced observation convinces me, from the number of the six hun­
dred families, that each of the thirty Alban hamlets, and each of
the thirty Latin towns sent wn: or rather that a connexion sub­
sisted, in consequence of which this was supposed to have been the
case 568 •
I have here spoken of two distinct unions, each consisting of
thirty places, the whole body of which might be called Latin: from
not making the same distinction, our historians have been led into
glaring contradictions with what they elsewhere assume to be true.
They cherish the opinion, that all the Latins proceeded from Alba;
as colonies the founding of which is ascribed to I,atinus Sylvius :
that these were the Prisci Latini, whose submission was demanded
by the Rom~n kings, on the plea of having succeeded to the su pre­
macy of Alba, and was enforced by Tarquinius .: and these Prisci La­
tini are designated as consisting like the others of thirty townscg.
And yet it is not to be mistaken that Laurentum and Ardea accord­
ing to the legend of lEneas existed long before Alba, even allow­
ing that Lavinium after its pretended restoration was regarded
as a colony: in like manner Tibur, as we see from similar legends,
was held to be older than Alba: and yet nobody would have
_doubted that all these belonged to the Prisci Latini, and to their
thirty cities. But though Livy and Dionysius contradict thcm­
sel ves, it was not so with the writers .they copied. Pliny, after
enumerating above twenty Latin towns whereof no trace remains,
subjoins to them a list of the Albian townships, consisting of the
Albans and thirty others whose names are alphabetically arranged:

5C8 That the word sexcenti should have been used to signify the greatest
possible,-or at least a very great number, is no longer surprising, when we re­
flect on the frequent occurrence of twice thirty, first among the Albans and
Latin$, and then among the Romans and Latins, where each unit contained
t<>n decuries. What completely fixed the usage, was, that for a long time a
Roman cohort consisted of six hundred men.
C9 Ab eo (Latino Sylvio) colonire aliquot deductw, Prisci Latini appellati.
Livy 1. 3. Tarquinius demands their submission as a right: quod, cum omnes
Latini ab Alba oriundi sint, in eo fredere teneantur quo res omnis Alban&
cum colonis suis in Romanum cesserit imperium. I. 52. Dionysius, m. 34,
speaking of Tullus Hostilius: '!rpllT~'" ei.11"01Tn'1..<1., ti' <rofl' .;..,,..;,.,u, <rt &<t.l
,;,,.~&ow, <1.v<rli, (,,.;;, A>..~<1.,) <rp1a'.&on<1. .,,.0>..'"· That the ;,,,.~,. ••,here a.re
0

the same as the ,.",,.0111.01 is proved by the particle "''·

1.-u
154 . HISTORY OF ROME.
all these, he says, had of yore partaken along with the Latins in
the flesh of the victim on the Alban mount, and like them had pe­
rished570, Here again the name he gives them ofpopuli .(Jlbenses,
and their number, speak for themselves; and leave no doubt that
these, and not the important cities, were the thirty places said to
have been colonies from Alba. Many among them may have ac­
tually received Alban colonists, as Roman colonists were sent to
the places reduced by the first kings in the neighbourhood of Rome:
but on the whole it is evident that there was a division like that of
the thirty plebeian tribes under the legislation of Servius: they were .
the boroughs of a free commonalty.
Their partaking in the flesh of the victim along with the other
Latin states on the Alban mount, shows that the latter stood in the
same relation to Alba as they subsequently did to Rome. Most
assuredly they were depenclent neighbours, and thirty in number,
not however the very same which afterward el}tered into a confed­
eracy with Rome, but only some of these; and the number was
made up by several of the towns,· which, having fallen into the
power of the Romans, had become colonies or been destroyed, such
as l\fodullia and Cameria.
Thus the present investigation has gained the same cheering re­
sult, as has rewarded the labour spent on many out of which this
work has been composed : that which seems to be absurd, is so
only when we look at it superficially; and it covers a groundwork
of uncorrupted truth, which may be brought to light; so that a
critical treatment of history becomes much richer in facts, than the
credulous repetition of the stories that have been handed down.
No building erected by the ancient Albans has left any visible
ruins: of the temple of Jupiter Latiaris the very foundation-walls
have been destroyed, which probably must have belonged to the
earliest ages. But among the works executed by Alba one is still
the source of blessings at this day, as it was five-and-twenty-.hundrcd
years ago, and it will endure imperishably: but the present gene­

570 Pliny III. 9. Cum his camem in monte Albano soliti accipere populi
Albenses: Albani-.lEsulani, Acienses, Abolani, Bubetani, Boiani (perhaps
Bovillani), Cusuetani, Coriolani, Fidenates, Foretii, Hortenses, Latinienses,
Longulani, Manates, · Macrales, Mutucumenses, Munienses, Numinienses,
Ol!iculani, Octulani, Pedani, Polluscini, Querquetulani, Sicani, Sisolenses,
Tolerienses, Tutienses, Vimitellarii, Velienses, Venetulani, Vitellenses. I
have only altered the punctuation before and after .11.lbani, which in the edi­
tions makes nonsense of the passage, and amended JEsulani and Polluscini.
Of the whole thirty names only six or seven, which are here printed in italics,
occur in the list of the thirty towns given by Dionysius v. 61, even after
adopting ~he corrections of the Vatican manuscript and those of Lapus.
 HISTORY OF HOME. 155

ration have no suspicion that they are indebted for their most fruit­
ful fields to the prince of a city which, lying in remote obscurity,
even beyond the fabulous ages of Rome, has almost left its existence
a matter of doubt. The acknowledgement and gratitude due on
this account I challenge in behalf of the Cluilius, whose name ap­
pears in Roman history, but has been foisted into an extremely
unsuitable place.
The valley of Grottaferrata is, as our eyes. tell us, the site of a
marsh that has been drained, or rather of a lake that has been let
off, like the vallis Jl.ricina. Now we read of a vallis .fllbana under
the Tusculan hills 5 7 1 : and thi•s can be no other than that valley ;
which consequently belonged to the immediate territory of Alba. ·
The water from it is carried off by two channels: the one is a ·canal
which runs into the Teverone: the other a tunnel hewn through
the rock, half a mile long, in the grand style of very early ages,
leading to the Campagna79 , Here, where none but bad water is to
be got, and that too out of very deep wells, the water brought by
this dyke, though muddy, was at least very serviceable for the cat­
tle and the soil: its course at first ~as probably directed towards
the sea; but even in the time of the Roman kings it was turned into
the city, where it now flows through the valley of the Circus into
the Tiber, being called la JJ:larrana all the way from its origin.
The portion of this dyke known to the spot where the Romans
turned it off, is the Fossa Cluilia, so called after the Alban dictator
by whom this great work was executed: five miles from the Porta
Capena, on the Latin 'road and the Cluilian dyke, is the place
where Coriolanus encamped : and in this very spot, by the ruinous
hamlet of Settebassi, does the Latin road cross the Marrana.
The list of the Alban kings is a very late and clumsy fabrication;
a medley of names, some of them not even Italian ones, some of
them repetitions out of earlier or later times, others coined out of
geographical names; and with scarcely any thing of a story belong­
ing to them. We are told that Livy took this list from L. Corne­
lius Alexander the Polyhistor78 : hence it was probably this client
571 Livy m. 7. In Tusculanos colles transeunt-descendentibus ab Tus­
culano in Albanam vallem. · ·
72 This is stated by Fabretti, an extremely trustworthy witness, De
aquis et aqureductibus n. 270: who however does not recognize the Cluilian
dyke any more than all his brother topographers. On the hill through which
the tunnel is carried, lies Centroni, an extensive ruin. Unfortunately I did
not read Fabretti's work till after my return from Rome; and I never heard
of that tunnel while I was there.
73 Servius.-on .IEn. vm. 330.
156 HISTORY OF ROME.
of Sylla that introduced the imposture into history: the variations
between Livy's lists and others are not very material, and are no
proof at all of their having been more than one ancient source.
Some of the names may have been derived from older traditions:
some of the kings of the Aborigines also had names assigned
to them 5 7 4 ; and these were entirely different from those of the
Alban. Even the yel!rs that each of the Alban kings reigned,
were numbered: and the number so exactly fills up the interval
between the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome according to
the canon of Eratosthenes, as of itself to show the late age of the
imposture.
For in earlier times the Romans reckoned three hundred years
from the building of Alba to that of Rome7 5 : even if this number
occurred only in Virgil, still it would be perfectly clear that it was
a statement of much higher antiquity, and that he .did not invent
the arithmctical progression three, thirty, three hundred. He
might think himself justified in retaini~g what an earlier poet had
said: but he would never have been seduced by numerical symmetry
to assign dates, the inaccuracy of which he must have perceived
just as well as every schoolboy from the tables of Apollodorus or
Cornelius Nepos. But it is gratifying, and more than we could
have expected, to find that ingenious writer Trogus Pompeius, who
treated the origin of Rome, as he did the earliest history of other
nations, with discriminatihg freedom, reckoning in like manner no
more than three hundred years for Alba7 6 ; as did Livy himself,
when he assumed four hundred years for its duration until its de­
struction about the year 100 of Rome77, This however was not
the. only ancient chronological statement at variance with that of
the Greeks. According to one which Servius has recorded, 360
years elapsed between the fall of Troy and the building of Rome7s,

574 Stercenius for instance, unless the name be mispelt. Servius on lEn.
XI. 850.
75 lEn. I. 272.
76 Justin XLIII. 1. Alba qure trecentis annis caput regni fuit.
77 Livy I. 29. Quadringentorum annorum opus, quibus Alba steterat.
The same thing occurs iii Servius on lEn. 1. 272, as a difficulty : cum earn
quadringentis annis regnasse constet sub Albania regibus: and he solves it as
I have done in the text. Tanaquil Faber in a note on the passage of Livy
has observed its connexion with the line of Virgil ; and Duker on the same
passage refers to Dodwell de Cyclis, diss. x. p. 678, who has noticed almost
all the passages I have cited, and has perceived the nullity of the Alban line
of kings.
78 Servius on lEn. I. 267. I hope I shall not be promoting rnysticism
 HISTORY OF R0;\1E. 157

just as many as between the building of Rome and its capture by

the Gauls. Now we find two other 'statements, the combination of
which leads us to this second number, and at the same time recon­
ciles it with the former: the first is, that .LEneas lived seven years
after the fall of Troy, engaged in his wanderings or in war579; the
second, that Silvius could not obtain possession of the throne before
his fifty-third year80 • · I would not pledge myself for the historical
truth of the story that a Silvian house reigned at Alba: but the fact
was assumed in the Alban records. The existence of such a house
presupposes that of a hero Silvius or Siluus. N O\V if the Latin tra­
dition, such as it was independent of the Trojan legend, maue Sil­
vius the founder of Alba, and three hundred years the interval
between the beginning of his reign and the building of .Rome; then
in order to introduce him into the Trojan legend, and to fill up the
interval of three hundred and sixty years between Troy and Rome,
it became necessary to take fifty-three years from the death of
.LEneas as the time during which Silvius, his posthumous son, was
unjustly excluded from the throne. And it is for the sake of recon­
ciling these native Alban Silvii with the Trojan legeHd, that the
posterity of Ascanius are removed out of the way by the abdication
of lulus.
From Silvius, their maternal ancestor, the Roman tradition de­
. rived the founders of the city; but it did not call the Romans a
colony from Alba.

and a childish love of trifling with numbers, when I remark the singular play
of chance, that there were just 360 years from the destruction of Rome by the
Gauls to the conquest of Alexandria, the foundation of the monarchy; and
the same number from the latter event to the dedication of Constantinople.
579 Dionysius 1. 65 : and Servius on ..!En. 1. 259; since he assumes four
years for the wandering of lEneas; to which must be added the three more
spent in the Latian town of Troy. In the ..!Eneid indeed the Trojans do not
reach Carthage till the seventh year of their voyage.
80 I am aware that Servius, on ..!En. vr. 770, relates this of Silvius
..!Eneas : but it seems quite evident that what was invented for the one Silvius,
has been transferred here to the other; who is wholly wanting in Ovid. The
same thing has happened in numberless instances.
 ROME.

VARIOUS TRADITIONS CONCERNING THE

FOUNDING OF THE CITY.

AMONG all the Greek cities built after the return of the Heraclids,
there was none so insignificant, that Ephorus, and the writers after
him who introduced accounts of the origin of cities into their gene­
ral histories, would have been unable to state specifically and with
sufficient certainty, from what people the colony had issued, and
who were the founders that led and gave laws to it; in far the most
cases they also fixed the epoch of the foundation. With regard to
Rome, the story ·of her foundation, though she is supposed to be
more recent than perhaps the greater part of those towns, and the
people from whom the eternal city originally sprang, are the very
points we are most ignorant of. But while it was suited to the
eternal city, that its roots should lose themselves in infinity, the
story told by the poets of the infancy and deification of Romulus
was no less in accord with the majesty of Rome. Its founder
could have been no other than a god.
Now while I acknowledge this with a feeling, the sincerity of
which none but a bigot, himself insincere, could seek to call in
question; and while I allow the heart and the imagination their
full claims; I at the same time assert the right of the reason, to
refuse to admit any thing as historical, which cannot possibly be
so; and, without excluding that noble tradition from its place at
the threshold of the history, to inquire whether it be in any degree
possible to ascertain what people the first Romans belonged to, and
 HISTORY OF ROME. 159

what were the changes attending the rise of that state, which, when
the light of historical truth begins to dawn, is Rome.
When the inhabitants of Roma, as their town began to emerge
from insignificance, so that they could. feel a pride in the Roman
name, looked back upon their dark period, and retraced the growth
of their community; it was natural for them to call the founder
of their nation Romus, or, with the inflexion so usual in their
language, Romulus. Supposing that there was in their neighbour­
hood a town called Remuria, inhabited by a kindred race, which
had been sometimes in alliance, sometimes ai war with them, and
which had fallen before tl1eir arms, they might consider its founder,
Remus, as the twin brother of Romulus, and as slain by him in a
fit of passionate irritation: and in proportion as their state estab­
lished itself under the peculiar character of a double state, the
more firmly fixed would be the notion which represented the city
as founded by twins. The story of Romulus might in other
respects have been the invention of foreigners, as well as of the
Romans themselves; but it is not so with this latter notion, which
does not occur in any other state, and is so peculiarly adapted to
Rome. And the story is proved to have sprung up on the very
site of the city, by the den of the shewolf, the fig tree at the roots
of which the sucklings were saved, by all the relics of Romulus,
and by that rich poem so much of which is connected with local
circumstance~ whereof foreigners knew not_hing. In what manner
all this gained a shape in the mind and on the lips of poets and
storytellers ; and how many generations passed away, during
which the traditions of other nations, and such perhaps as had long
been current, were applied to the origin of Rome, before that which
began as po,etry, became popular belief; these are points that we
must and may be satisfied to remain ignorant of. If the annals
were restored, ~nd received the chronological outline in wJ1ich we
find them, soon after the taking of the city by the Gauls, it is clear,
and indeed in other respects it does not admit of doubt, that even
thus early they represented Romulus as the first king.
Considering how few monuments have been preserved to us from
the early ages of Rome, we may regard it as an ancient testimony
of a belief living among the people and recognized by the state,
that in the year 458 bronze figures of the shewolf and the babe3
were set up near the Ficus Ruminalis ; the oldest and the finest
work of Roman art; which has reached us like the Homeric poems,
thoug:h so much that was more recent has been lost. .
The story which settled as an article of popular belief, was, that
 IGO HISTORY OF ROME.

Rome had been built by twin brothers, who were the sons of a
princess deflowered by Mars, and who had been delivered by divine
protection from a watery death, and fostered anJ suckled by a she­
. wolf, the animal sacred to their sire. It was impossible that the
outlines of this tradition should not in course of time receive very
different modifications ; and there probably were still more than
the two main forms under which it appears to us, according as it is
connected with Alba and the Silvii, or with lEneas.
I defer yet awhile relating the former of these legends, which
every body knows, and which, if it were not in some degree inter­
esting to restore such features as· have been altered in the later re­
presentations, it would be sufficient to allude to : in the second,
which was adopted by N mvius and Ennius, the unfortunate princess
was called Ilia, the daughter of 1Eneas581 , It may be conjectured
that in 'this also she was represented as a Vestal; else it seems·
there would have been no pretext f?r condemning her to death.
She was thrown into the Anio; ·out of which stream her fortune
rose again"~: the river god made her his bride 83 • Virgil's descrip­
tion of the generous brute, feeding and caressing the babes in her
den, was framed after Ennius 84 • This poet like other writers
called the tyrant Amulius; and that he bore the same name in
N mvius, seems hardly to be questioned; for there is a very corrupt
fragment which may readily be corrected by introducing this name,
but scarcely in any oth!)r manner 85 ; I cannot however discover the
slightest indication, whether the old poets supposed any affinity
between this Amulius and the house of lEneas; or how they ac­
counted for Ilia being his subject; or whether they made mention
of Ascanius or Silvius. In the fragment of Ennius Ilia is an or­
phan; for her father appears to her in a dream; her sister, to who~
in her disquietude she relates the nocturnal vision, is the daughter
of a Eurydice.
That. ingenious critic, Perizonius, whose subtile observations
were lost on his contemporaries, has shown that the mother of
Romulus, when she is called Ilia, is always the daughter of 1E11eas;
when Rea Silvia, an Alban princess; and that Ilia is never called

581 Hence came the story of lEmylia and Ares. Plutarch Romul. c. 2.
82 Post ex fluvio fortuna resistet: Ennius p. 124.
83 Servius on JE·n. 1. 274, and v1. 778. Acron and Porphyrius on Horace
Od. I. 3.

84 Servius on lEn. vm. G31.

85 See in Hermann Elem. doctr. metr. p. 631.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 161

Reasso: I add, that the reading Rhea is a corruption introduced by

the editors, who at a very unseasonable time bethought themselves
of the goddess: rea seems to have signified nothing more than the
culprit8 7, The semblance of a proper name may indeed have arisen
early : at least it was certainly from some tradition that Virgil took
the priestess Rea, who bare Aventinus to Hercules 88 ; ·a duplicate
of the Alban Silvia, with a happier destiny ; and perhaps the daugh­
ter of Evander.
Rea Silvia has no necessary connexion with ..iEneas. That the
tradition concerning her is more ancient than the one concerning
Ilia, I conjecture, because the computation which makes 333 or 360
years intervene between Troy and Rome, is to all appearance at
least a. century and a half older than Naivius. The inexplicable
point is, how they who reckoned the years of Rome in thi~ way,
could adopt Ilia: when the Grecian computations, which extended
that interval to between 430 and 440 years, became generally
known, she necessarily disappeared. I look upon it as almost cer­
tain, that some unknown Greek poem, one of those which brought
Romulus close to the time of ..iEn,eas, was the means whereby Ilia
was imported into Latium.
A careless expression used by Plutarch, which in fact merely
asserts that one Diocles of Peparethus first made the story of Silvia
known to the Greeks*, has, from his simply adding that Diocles
was the writer mostly followed by Fabius, unaccountably given rise
to the notion that the story was the invention of this unknown
Greek, a person so insignificant that Dionysius has not even admitted
him into his host of Greek authorities. Nothing but Plutarch's
expressly asserting that Fabius, who was a senator, and whose
narrative coincided with the sacred songs 89 , had copied a Greek.,
and had himself avowed it, could compel us to yield to the evi­
dence of a fact so incredible: as no such evidence. exists, there is
nothing to prevent our supposing, that Plutarch only inferred what
he says from the agreement between the two writers, because
Diocles was perhaps a little the elder: nevertheless it was from
Romans that he heard, what the Greeks read for the first time in
his work.
Of the other Roman accounts, Dionysius mentions one, where

586 Excursus ~n lElian. V. H. VII. p. 510. ff.

87 Or the guilty woman: it reminds us of the expression, reafemina,
which often occurs in Boccacio. ·
88 lEn. VII. 659. * Romul. 3.
80 Dionysius 1. 79. See below note 616
1.-v
162 HISTORY OF ROME.
Romulus and Remus are the grandsons of JEneas, and are delivered
up as hostages to Latinus, who leaves them a part of his king­
dom5e0: he also cites another which is copied from Cephalon91 •
Among the Roman writers preserved to us, Sallust alone unequivo­
cally and expressly adopts the opinion which carries Rome back to
the Trojan times; undoubtedly his purpose was only to get rid of Ro·
mulus and the marveUous fable: it is a feature characteristic of such
writers, that in order to do this he admits the settlement of JEneas,
though no way more historical. If Velleius had spoken of the
armies of Latinus supporting his grandson Romulus at the found·
ing of the city, at the same time that he assumed the common era·
for the building, he would have confounded the two opinions in a
manner so thoughtless and so contrary to his custom, that we must
needs adopt the emendation proposed by Lipsius 99 ,
If the native legend however is simple in the main, the statements
of the Greeks as to the founder of Rome and the person after
whom it was named, present greater varieties than occur in the
case of any other city. It is clear that the Greeks were early
aware of the power and importance of Rome, and that too before
intercourse had made them acquainted with the Romans; so they
introducetl this people into their genealogies: but as nothing was
related of it in any poem of general 11otoriety, and it was not till
very late that the native legend crossed the sea, several writers
invented such stories as served to express their views. These
accounts do not indeed properly deserve to be called traditions;
and they might be passed over without any material loss to the
history: but as the reports of them_ are so utterly confused that no
slight pains are necessary to arrange them foi: a general view, and
as I have attempted to do so, I will allow him the inconsiderable
room which they require when reduced to order. Others will thus
be spared a troublesome task ; and unless a complete survey be
taken of them, they may seem to promise what they do not at all
afford93 •
Among these fictions however we are by no means to class the
mention made of Rome by Antiochus, who related that Sicelus was

590 Dionysius r. 73.

91 Dionysius 1. 73. See below notes 600 and 610. ,
[)2 Adjutus legionibus Latinis avi sui; not Latini. VeiJeius 1. 8..
93 They are preserved by Dionysius 1. 72, 73; Plutarch Romul. 2. 3;
S ervius on lEn. 1. 274; and Festus v. Roma. Solinus has only made ex­
tracts, like Festus, but far more scantily, from Verrius Flaccus, who himself
i;eems chiefly to have drawn from Dionysius.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 163

flying from \hence when he came to the ltalian king Morges 594 •
Hereby he designates Roma to have been one of the chief cities of
the Tyrrhenian Siculians; so that he contradicts the opinion of its
Trojan origin; yet he is not on that account to be reckoned among
those who denied the settlement of the Trojans in Latium. Con­
nected with this view is the statement that Rome was founded by
the Pelasgians. They who held this people to be Greeks, said,
that being a warlike race they gave their city a name expressive of
their vigour: while such as looked upon them as an Italian tribe,
fabled that the first name was Valencia, and that afterward, when
Evander and ...:Eneas took possession of the country with their fol·
lowers who spoke Greek, it was exchanged for the corresponding
Greek word 95 • And according to that quality in traditions which
has been so often remarked, we must perceive that the Pelasgic
origin of Rome is implied in the legend that the author of the name
was Romus, a Latin tyrant, who had driven the Lydian Tyrrhe­
nians out of this regions 0• Many writers, says Dionysius, call
Rome a Tyrrhenian city 97: by this most of them, like Scylax,
probably understood an Etruscan; the earlier however may have
meant a Pelasgian.
With these exceptions, the Greeks who mentioned the founding
of Rome before Timams, were unanimous in opinion, that the city
was built immediately, or within a very few generations, after the
fall of Troy. But on one point they were divided: while most of
them considered the Trojans as the founders, either alone, or in
conjunction with the Aborigines; some on the contrary contended
for Greeks ; others for a mixed band of the two nations.
Among the advocates of the first @pinion but few named ...:Eneas
himself as the founder; a far greater number Romulus, whom they
described sometimes as his son (coming according to some writers
from foreign parts into Italy, according to others, born of an Italian
mother), sometimes as his grandson, or more remote descendant98 •

594 Dionysius 1. 73.

95 Some anonymous writers in Plutarch: a Cuman chronicle in Festus:
Adeius (whose name apparently is mispelt) in Servius. The chronicle of
Cuma makes the Pelasgians proceed from Athens through Thespiw (in Breo­
tia) to the Tiber; while the Greeks gave their emigration precisely the oppo­
site direction. In the very corrupt passage of Festus .I venture, instead of
subjecti qui fuerint Caeximparum 'l!iri, unicarumque 'l!irium, to read subj. q. f.
Caci, improbi 'I!. un. 'I!.
96 Plutarch. This is another instance of an inverted fable.
97 Dionysius 1. 2~. Sey lax makes Tyrrhenia reach p.t)(.f' 'p.,p_~, ?rOAfoa,.
98 lEneas is supposed to be the founder by those who derived the name
 164 HISTORY OF ROME.
Callias, the historian of Agathocles, spoke of Romulus and Romus
as the founders of the city, calling them the sons of king Latinus
by a Trojan heroine, Roma, who had persuaded the women to put
an end to their wanderings by setting fire to the ships: the same
fable is alluded to by Lycophron 59 9• Even Cephalon of Gergithes,
the most ancient of the writers quoted, mentioned the names both.
of Romulus and Romus, as the two younger of the four sons of
iEneas, who is said by him to have died on the peninsula of Pal­
lene. Ascanius shares his inheritance with them ; whereupon they
emigrate, and found Rome, Capua, and two fabulous cities, Anchise
and 1Enea600 • This was copied by a Roman whose name Diony­
sius does not mention; and who absurdly added, that this most
ancient Rome was afterwards destroyed, and was rebuilt by a second
Romulus and a second Remus.
Motley as are the changes that all the other circumstances under­
go in the Greek stories, they speak of the two brothers very early:
and hence, even when they wrote their Roman history according to
native accounts, the Remus of the Latins always goes with them by
the name of Romus.
With regard to the second opinion, which makes Rome a Gre­
cian city founded at the time of the return from Troy, I have already

of the city from his wife Roma j the daughter of Telemachus (Clinias in Ser­
vi us), of !talus, or of Telephus {Plutarch): Romulus, or Romus, or both of
them, the sons of .iEneas, and of Creusa, Priam's daughter (the old scholia
on Lycophron in Tzetzes on v. 122G ; probably also Cephalon, Agathyllus,
and Demagoras;in Dionysius) of Dexithea (Plutarch), of Lavinia (Apollodo­
rus in Festus) ; the grandsons of .iEneas, and sons of Ascanius (Eratosthenes
in Servius, Dionysius of Chalcis in Dionysius). To this account also belongs
Roma, the daughter of Ascanius: (Agathocles of Cyzicus in Festus). Ac­
cording to another account of the same Agathocles, Romulus is a still more
remote descendant of .iEneas: and one Alcimus (in Festus) called Romulus
the son of lEneas, but Rom us the grandson ofRomulus by Alba, and the founder
of the city. There is a connexion between the Trojan legend and that which
terms Rom us the son of Emathion, sent by Diomedes from Troy. Plutarch.
5[)9 v. 1252, 53: where we are clearly not at liberty to read i~o;tor pr.iµ~
'}tvo,, with some manuscripts, instead of '&~. 'Pr.iµ~' '}ivo,. Roma plays a
part in these fables under the most various forms. She sets fire to the ships
of the Trojans, or of the Greeks ; is the daughter of the virago who did so, of
Ital us, of Telephus, of Ulysses, of Telemachus, of Ascanius, of Evander (and
thus the same with Launa who married Hercules); a priestess who prophe­
sied to Evander (that is, Carmentis): and she is represented as wedded to
.iEneas, to Ascanius, and to Latin us.
600 Dionysius 1. 73. The name Anchise may perhaps have been formed
from Anxur.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 165

mentioned that it was related by Aristotle 601 • It is also implied in

the tale that a son of Ulysses and Circe was the founder of Rome 1 •
And this must have been the notion of Heraclides Ponticus 3 at the
beginning, and of king Demetrius Poliorcetes4 soon after the middle
of the fifth century;. who cannot possibly have supposed that the
Romans were in any other respect of Greek origin, or a colony of
the latter strictly Greek tribes: besides according to the Greek way
of thinking, it was a politic method of acquiring influence over
powerful barbarians, who would not submit to be commanded, to
treat them as of Greek extraction: this was the last refinement of
flattery. By these accounts the Trojan legend is excluded: it was
only at a very late period that the Trojans, after they had entirely
disappeared, began to be reckoned among the Greeks : Scylax
terms the Elymians of Sicily Trojans and barbarians 5 • From this
Greek legend Roma and the burning the ships was introduced by
Callias into the Trojan one.
A similar medley prevails in Lycophron 6 , who introduces a band
of Mysians under the sons of Telephus, Tarchon and Tyrrhenus,
that is, of Tyrrhenians: Telephu3 himself was of Arcadian descent,
and the Ceteians were proba~ly a different people from the Mysians,
as the Meonians were from the Lydians. It also occurred, as
Dionysius informs us, in the chronicle which followed the succes­
sion of the Argive priestesses. In this legend the fouuders of the
colony are Trojans; in Lycophron. the brothers, the offspring of
lEneas; in the Argive chronicle lEneas himself: the Greeks are
companions of Ulysses. The latter hero continues to make his
appearance here, even in the poems of a later age : and he too was
made out to be connected with Romulus and Remus; since Latinus,
who in this shape of the story again is said to have been their father
by the Trojan heroine Roma, is termed the ,grandson of Ulysses
through Telemachus7, ·

601 Seep. 141. A writer, who related peculiarities of manners so insig­

nificant as the custon of greeting relativ~s with a kiss (Plutarch Qurest. Rom.
6. p. 2G5. b.), must have had more than a superficial knowledge of Rome,
though he ado1;ted the legends of the Italian Greeks on its antiquities.
2 Romus (Xenagoras in Dionysius); Roman us (Plutarch). That Romus
is a national name here, is proved by those of his brothers Ardeas and Antias:
so that Xenagoras belongs to the number of those who asserted the Tyrrhe­
nian character of the city.
3 Plutarch Camill. 22.

4 Strabo v. p. 232. b: where we must read, 'l'ou' i<Aon<tc ""·A.

5 p. 3. 6 v. 1242. foll.

7 There are so'me other statements concerning the foundation of Rome,

 166 HISTORY OF ROME.

Apart from all these writers stand Syclax,-who applies the enno­
bling epithet i;.;..,l, to every city of Greek origin, even when de­
graded by barbarian conquest, and who calls the Elymians Trojans
-and others, who according to Dionysius. ascribed Rome to the
Tyrrhenians 608 : that is, if, like Scylax, they meant the Etruscans.
I have said that Tima:ms of Sicily seems to have been the first
historian among the Greeks who introduced Romulus and Remus
into history as remote descendants of JEneas. Ile wrote not many
years after Callias, but cannot have adopted his opinion; for Timmus
supposed the building of Rome contemporaneous with that of Car­
thage ; and he dated the latter nearly 380 years after the destruction
of Troy. Perhaps however· the same account was also given by
Hieronymus of Cardia, who in his history of Alexander's succes­
sors, written about the time of Timmus, gave a short relation of the
early history of Rome: Dionysius censures its meagreness, as well
as that of Timmus and Polybius, in whom the narrative was already
become more eopious 9• For himself he warns the readers of
those three writers not to suspect him of fabricating, should they
find more in him than what those three contained, but his warning
does not extend to the case of their refating what was totally differ­
ent. Yet even after their time the older Grecian legend was pre­
served among the philologers and readers of antique curiosities
who sprang up at Alexandria; among those who refused to draw
from any source but the early literature of Greece. Heraclides
Lembus, about the year 600, repeated Aristotle's account of the
Achmans and the captive Trojan women: the old scholia on Lyco­
phron, which perhaps, even in their original form, were of a still
later date, called Romulus and Ramus the sons of Creusa, the
daughter of Priam: nay, even Orus of Thebes, who cites Cepha­
lon, describes them as the sons of JEneas and founders of Rome 10.

which cannot be adapted to this arrangement: Romus is called by Antigonus

in Festus the son of Jupiter; by an anonymous author in Dionysius the son
of !talus and of Electra, the daughter of Latinus: that is to say Rome is a
primeval Italian and a Trojan city.
8 Peripl. p. 2. See above note 5!)7. 9 1. 7.
10 Etymolog. Magn. v. K«?Tu• and 'p,;p.•. Compare Sylburg's note.
A remarkable instance of the way in which the fables received from Italy
were confounded with each other, is afforded by the account taken from one
Promathion in Plutarch; where the legends concerning the birth of Romulus
and that of Servius are mixed up together in the strangest manner.
 ROM ULUS AND NUMA.

THE old Roman legend ran as follows : Procas king of Alba left
two sons : Numitor,, the elder, being weak and spiritless, suffered
Amulius to wrest the government from hirn, and reduce him to his
father's private estates. In the possession of these he lived rich,
and, as he desired nothing more, secure : but the usurper dreaded
the claims that might be set up by heirs of a different character.
He therefore caused Numitor's son to be murdered, and appointed
Silvia, his daughter, one of the vestal virgins.
Amulius had no children, or at least only one daughter; so that
the race of Anchises and Aphrodite seemed on the point of expiring,
when the love of a god prolonged it, in opposition to the ordinances
of man, and gave it a lustre worthy of its origin. Silvia had gone
into the sacred grove, to draw water from the spring for the ser­
vice of the temple: the sun quenched its rays ; the sight of a wolf
made her fly into a cave 61 i; there Mars overpowered the timid vir­
gin; and then consoled her with the promise of noble children, as Po­
sidon did Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus. But he did not protect
her against the tyrant, nor did her protestations of her innocence save
her : the condemnation of the unfortunate priestess seemed to be
exacted by Vesta herself; for at the moment of the childbirth her
image in the temple hid its eyes, her altar trembled, and her fire
died away 19 : and Amulius was allowed to command that the mo­
ther and her twin babes should be drowned in the river13 • In the

611 I insist in behalf of my Romans on the right of taking the poetical

features wherever they are to be found, when they have dropt out of the
common narrative. In the present case they are preserved by Servius on
1En. 1. 274: the eclipse by Dionysius u. 56, and Plutarch Romul. c. 27.
· 12 Ovid. Fast. m. 45.
13 In poetry of this sort we have no right to ask; why she was thrown·
into the river ?-whichever of the two it may have been :-and not into the
Alban lake?
 168 HISTORY OF ROME.

Anio Silvia exchanged her earthly existence for deity: and the river
was enabled to carry the bole or cradle wherein the children were
laid, into the Tiber, which had at that time overflowed its banks
far and wide even to the foo~ of the woody hills. At the root of
a wild figtree, the Ficus Ruminalis, which continued to be preserved
and held sacred for many centuries at the foot of the Palatine, the
cradle overturned. A shewolf had come to slake her thirst in the
strer.m; she heard the whimpering of the children, carried them
into her den hard by 614 , made a bed for them, licked and suckled
them: when they wanted something more than milk, a woodpecker,
the bird sacred to Mars, brought them food: other birds conse­
crated to auguries hovered over the. babes, to drive aw~y noxious
insects. This marvellous spectacle· was beheld by Faustulus, the
shepherd of the royal flocks: the shewolf gave way to him, and
resigned the children to human nurture." Acea Larentia, the shep­
herd's wife, became their fostermother; they grew up along with
her twelve sons 15 on the Palatine hill, in straw huts which they built
themselves: that of Romulus was preserved by continual repairs
down to the time of Nero, as a sacred relic. They were the most
active of the shepherd lads, brave. in fighting against wild beasts
and robbers, maintaining their right against every one by their
might, and converting might into right. Their spoil they shared
with their comrades ; the adherimts of Romulus were called Quinc­
tilii ; those of. Remus Fabii : and now the seeds of· discord were
sown. Their wantonness engaged them in disputes with the shep­
herds of the wealthy Numitor, who fed their flocks on mount Aven­
tine : so that here, as in the story of Evander and Cacus, we find
the quarrel between ·the Palatine and the Aventine in the tales of
the remotest times. Remus was taken by a stratagem of these
neighbours, and dragged to Alba as a robber. A foreboding, the
remembrance of his grandsons awakened by hearing the story of

614 It is remarkable how even th'ose who did not renounce the poetry of
the narrative, endeavoured to reduce it to a minimum; to the fostering care
of the wolf at the moment when she first found the little orphans by the Ficus
Ruminalis: as if in this case, as well as that of S. Denis, every thing did not
depend on the first step. The Lupercal itself bears witness to the genuine
form of the fiction; and the conception of the two poets accorded with it.
Virgil gives a description of the cave of l\iavors: Ovid sings (Fast. m. 53.),
Lacte quis infantes nescit crevisse ferino, Et picum expositis sape tulisse cibos.
· Nor did the poetical feature escape Trogus: cum smpius ad parvulos reverte­
retur. The story of the woodpecker and its {"'µfa-µ"""" could not have beec
invented of newborn infants.
15 Masurius Sabinus in Gellius N. A. v1. 7.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 16!)

the two brothers, restrained N umitor from a hasty sentence: the cul­
prit's foster-father hurried with Romulus to the city, and told the old
man and the youths of their mutual relation. The youths undef"
took to avenge their own wrong and that of their house: with their
trusty comrades, whom the danger of Remus had summoned into
the city, they slew the king ; and the people of Alba became again
subject to the rule of Numitor.
This is the old tale, such as it was written by Fabius, and
sung in ancient sacred lays tlown to the time of Dionysius 616 , It
certainly belongs to any thing rather than history: its essence is
the marvellous; we may strip this of its peculiarities, and pare
away and alter, until it is reduced to a possible every day incident;
but we ought to be firmly convinced, that the caput mortuum which
will remain, will be any thing but a historical fact. .Mythological
tales of this sort are misty shapes, often no more than a Fata Mof'."
gana, the prototype of which is invisible, the law of its refraction
unknown ; and even were it not so, still it would S\lrpass any
powers of reflection, to proceed so s~btly and skilfully, ~s to divine
the unknown prototype from these strangely blended forms. But
such magical shapes are tlifferent from mere dreams, and are not
without a hidden foundation of real truth. The name of dreams
belongs only to the fictions imagined by the later Greeks, after the
tradition had become extinct, and when individuals were indulging
a wanton licence in altering the old legends; not considering that
their diversity and multiplicity had been the work of the whole
people, and .was not a matter for individual caprice to meddle
with.
Love for the home that fate had assigned them, recalled the
youths to the banks of the Tiber, to found a city there. The ter­
ritories of the more ancient towns in the neighbourhood, Antemnre,
Ficulea, Tellena, confined them to a narrow district; and that of
Rome cannot be conceived to have extended at first in the direction
of Alba so far as Festi, a place between the fifth and sixth mile­
stones; where, as to the border of the original ager Romanus, the
Ambarvalia were solemnized yearly in the reign of Tiberius 1 7,
The shepherds, their old comrades, were their first citizens ; the
story of their being joined by Albans, nay even by Trojan nobles,
is certainly no part of the ancient tradition: the Julii and other
similar houses do not ~ppear till after the destruction of Alba.

b,, b rro7r 7rtLTff?1~ Up.1 ,u U;rQ

1
· 616 1. 79. 1 l'UJµ~J.u1· iTI •xi l.'Vv f.f"liTd.l.
J 7 Strabo v. p. 230. a.

1.-w.

170 lllSTORY OF ROME.

Being left to themselves, with equal authority and power, the
brothers now disputed which was entitled to the honor of being
the founder of the city, and of calling it after his name Roma or Re­
moria; and whether it was to be built on the Palatine or the Aven­
tine; or, according to another tradition, whether on the Palatine,
or four miles further down the river 618 • Each observed the hea­
vens from the top of his chosen hill: he whom the augury should
favour, was to decide as king. A person who sought for auspices
used to rise in the stillness of midnight, to determine in his mind
the limits of the celestial temple, and then wait for presaging· ap­
pearances. The whole day passed, and the following night: at
length Remus had the first augury, and saw six vultures flying from
north to south ; but at sunrise, when these tidings were announced
to Romulus, a flock of twelve vultures flew by him. Right was
on the side of his brother: but Romulus boasted of the double
number of his birds as an evident sign of divine favour ; and his
party being the stronger confirmed his usurpation 19•
It seems as if this augury of the twelve fated birds had origin­
ally been a poetical mode of expressing an Etruscan prophecy,
that a period of twelve secles was allotted to Rome: and as if it
was not till afterward that the allegory assumed the shape of a
legend, and was then expounded back again into its first meaning:
this was done so early as Varro's time by a celebrated augur named
Vettius 20 , The prophecy was never forgotten, and in the twelfth
century of the city, which is divided between the fourth and fifth
of our era, filled all the adherents of the old religion with alarm;
as every thing was visibly verging toward ruin, and their faith was
oppressed. According to Varro's Fasti the twelfth secle, if each,
after the custom of the later Romans, was assumed equal to a cen­
tury, would end with the year 446: ~ut although the train of

618 This would probably be the hill beyond S. Paolo. I have no doubt that
there was a place called Remoria; and this eminence is very well adapted
for a town, the air being healthy. Ennius too must have had a more distant
spot in his mind ; since with him Romulus makes his observations on the
Aventine, p. 19. And this accords with the legend of the javelin which Ro·
mulus, after taking the auguries, hurled to the Palatine, where it caught root,
and where the cornel-tree that sprang from it was shown down to the time
of Caligula. Servius on lEn. m. 46. Plutarch Romul. c. 20. Argum.
Metam. xv. fob. 48. '
19 Ennius says nothing of the birds seen by Remus: much less does his
account admit fraud on the part of Romulus.
20 Varro 1. 18. Antiquitatum, in Censorinus, 17. From his name he
should be a Marsian. See Vossius on Velleius 11. 16.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 171

calamities that broke in with the fifth century of our era, gave an
air of probability to this interpretation in the minds of those who
were then living, a Tuscan aruspex would nevertheless have re­
jected it. As an average· number for secles of an indefinite length
determined by the life of man, and as an astronomical cyclical
period, 110 years were properly the measure of a secle621. This
brings the sum of the years contained in twelve secles to 1320, and
the end of the term assigned to Rome to an epoch when it may be
said with strict truth that the city of Romulus ceased to exist.
According to Varro's chronology the twelfth secle would have
ended with A. D. 566: according to Cincius, to whom the Etrus­
can, on grounds that will appear further on; would probably have
given the preference, with A. n. 591, the first year of the pontifi­
cate of Gregory the Great. In either case the time expires in the
latter half of the sixth century of our era: when the. city, after
having been more than once taken by storm, saw the remnant that
the sword had spared, wasting away by hunger and pestilence;
when the senate and the old families which were still left, were
exterminated by Totila, so that scarcely the name of senator, or a
shadow of a municipal constitution survived; when Rome was
subject to the degrading rule of an Eastern exarch who resided at
a distance from her; when the old religion, and along with it all
hereditary usages, were abolished, and a new religion was preach­
ing other virtues and another kind of happiness exclusively, and
was condemning sins unreproved by the old morality; when the
ancient sciences and arts, all old memorials and monuments, were
looked upon as an abomination, the great men of ancient times
as doomed to hopeless perdition; and Rome, having been disarmed
for ever, was become the capital of a spiritual empire, which after
the lapse of twelve centuries we have seen interrupted in our days.
The Tuscan would perhaps also have interpreted the six secles
corresponding to the legitimate augury of Remus, as signifying the
duration of the legal and free constitution, and have reckoned them
down to the times of Sylla or of Cresar: for every interpretation
of a prophecy requires free room; and this might have been justi­
fied in either way.
The foundation-day of Rome was celebrated on the festival of
Pales, the 21st of April; when the country people, the earliest in­
habitants of Rome, besought the goddess of shepherds for the pro­
tection and increase of their flocks, and for pardon for the involun­

2Gl Censorinus 17. See above, p. lo:l.

172 HISTORY OF ROME.

tary violation of consecrated spots, purifying themselves by pass­

ing through a straw fire: like those which it was the custom in the
middle ages to kindle on May day.
Romulus now set about determining the pomrerium622 : he fixed
a copper share. on a plough, yoked a bullock and a heifer to it, and
drew a furrow round the foot of the Palatine, so as to include a
considerab1e compass below the hill. The person who thus marked
out a pomrerium, was to guide the plough so that all the clods
should fall inward: he was followed by others who took care that
none was left turned another way. In the Comitium 28 a vault was
built under ground, and filled with firstlings of all the natural pro­
ductions that sustain human life, and with earth which each of the
foreign settlers had brought with him from his home : this place
was called JJfundus, and was the door of the nether world, which
was opened on three several days in the year for the spirits of the
dead 24 •
On the line of. the pomrerium the city was enclosed with a wall
and ditch. Remus, still resenting the wrong he had suffered, leapt
in scorn over the puny rampart: for this he was slain by Celer, or
by Romulus himself; and his death was an omen that none should
cross the walls but to his own destruction. Romulus however
abandoned himself to grief, rejecting comfort and food; until the
shade of Remus appeared to their foster-parents, and promised to
be reconciled to him on condition of a festival for the souls of the
departed 2s. As a permanent mark of honour, a second throne was
set for him by the side of the king's, with the sceptre; crown, and
other badges of royalty 26 •
The new city was open to receive every stranger: exiles, and
fugitives for homicide, who commonly could only get leave to dwell
as sojourners in a foreign land, even runaway slaves and criminals,
were welcome 27. These fellows however were single au'd wanted
wives; Romulus e1~deavoured to form treaties with the neighbour­
622 I reserve what I have to say on the signification of the p~~rerium,
and on the course of the one attributed to Romulus, that I may not interrupt·
the account of the legend. See the text to note 734.
23 A line drawn between 100 and 200 paces to the south of and parallel
with one running from S. Maria Liberatrice to what was once called the tem­
ple of concord (the Basilica of the Cresars), would pass through the Comitium.
2-1 Plutarch Romul. c. u. Festus v. Mundus. ·
25 The Lemuria. Ovid. Fast. v. 461-480.
26 Servius on 1En. 1. 276.
27 Still in ancient times this rabble cannot have been conceived to have
formed any considerable part of the population: for the asylum was a small
 HISTORY OF ROME. 173

ing tribes, such as were necessary in It~ly as well as in Greece, to

render marriages with foreigners legitimate 628 : but the wild suitors
were regarded with dislike, and the dangerous horde they belonged
to with disquietude. The refusal was insultingly expressed; they
who gave it, fancied, like all who think haughtily of themselves,
that the humbled party would feel conscious of deserving the re·
buke for their presumption. Hence they conceived no suspicion,
when Romulus proclaimed that festive processions and games were
to be held in celebratiou of the Consualia 20, and invited his neigh­
bours, the Latins and Sabines, to attend them ; for Rome stood
where the territorirs of those two nations ran into one another.
A number of people came as to a fair; indeed festivals of this kind
were always fairs, and in Italy, as in Greece and in the East, were
under the safeguard of religion: but neither religion nor the laws
of hospitality protected the deceived strangers, and their maidens
were carried offJ 0 , The old legend spoke of no more than thirty
captives; this cannot be denied, but it has been admitted with re·
luctance 81 ; and even by Livy, though he tells the tale of these times
like a history, without meaning it for one; his poetical feeling ena­

inclosure on the Capitoline hill, and in its quality of asylum could only af­
ford protection within its precincts.
()28 From this it is clear that in this earliest legend Rome was no way
considered as a colony of Alba or as a Latin city : much less was any thing
said about an emigration of noble houses. Had Rome been a colo~y, it would
have had the right of intermarriage with all the Latin cities from the first.
I am here still speaking only of that consistency in which old poetical fictions
are by no means deficient, and not as of historical events.
2!J This festival, sacred to the god of secret deliberations, was solemnized
symbolically by uncovering an altar buried in the earth: hence the history of
Romulus has been enriched with the tale, that his finding this altar was the
occasion or pretext of the festival.
30 The rape was almost universally placed in the fourth month of the
first year of the city. But this must not be considered.as resting on any tra­
dition : the Consualia being celebrated in Sextilis, there were four months
between that and the Palilia. Cn. Gellius alone dated the rape in the fourth
year; and not without the approbation of Dionysius (u. 31.). Now here we
have an evident falsification: his gl)od sense told him it was impossible a
stroke of this sort should have been hazarded before the city was fortified, and
he made use of the number which had been assigned to the month ; conclud­
ing that the old legend had confounded the month and the year.
31 Plutarch Romul. c. 14: and Livy I. 13. Id non traditur, cum haud
dubie aliquanto numerus major hoc mulierum fuerit, rotate an dignitatibus an
sorte Iectm sint, qum nomina curiis darent. He did not observe how uni­
formly this number, thirty, runs through the legends as well as the institu­
tions ofanciPnt Rome.
 174 IIISTORY OF ROME.
bling him to comprehend these ages better than those in which
historical light was beginning to dawn.
The nearest three of the outraged cities, which belonged to the
Latins or Siculians, Antemnre, Crenina, and Crustumerium, took
up arms without concert; while the Sabines lingered until they
had all three fallen one after the other, and Romulus had won the
royal spoils from Acron of Camina: whose Greek name is a proof
that Pelasgian recollections lived on in the legends of very late
times. At last the Sabine king, Titus Tatius, led a powerful army
against Rome. Unable to resist him in the field, Romulus retreated
into the city, over against which the Saturnian hill, afterward called
the Capitoline, was fortified and garrisoned: a swampy valley, the
site of the Forum, parted the two hill;;. The golden bracelets and
collars of the Sabines632 dazzled Tarpeia: bribed by them she opened
a gate of the fortress entrusted to the command of her father : the
load of the ornaments hurled upon her crushed her, and she expia­
ted her crime by her death. Yet her grave was to be seen upon
the hill; and it was asked by wrongheaded sceptics, whether it was
. conceivable that such an honour should have been paid to a trait­
tress? they forgot that the hill continued in the hands of the Sa­
bines.
The remembrance of her guilt is still living in a popular legend.
The whole of the Capitoline hill is pierced with quarries or passa­
ges constructed in very remote times through the loose tufo : many
·of these have been blocked up ; but near the houses erected upon
the rubbish which covers the hundred steps, on the side of the Tar·
peian rock facing the forum, besides some ruinous buildings known
by the name of the Palazzaccio, several of them are still accessible.
A report that there was a well here of extraordinary depth, which
must have been older than the aqueducts, since no one would have
spent the labour on it afterward, and by which no doubt the garri­
son was supplied with water during the siege by the Gauls, attracted
me into this labyrinth : some girls from the neighbouring houses
were our guides, and told us as we went along, that in the heart of

632 The Roman poet conceived the poor Sabines to be covered with gold,
as Fauriel observes that the bards of modern, Greece do their Clepts. Here
are the marks of popular poetry too clear to be mistaken by any who have
eyes to see: it is in the very spirit that created all the splendour and the trea­
sures in the house of Menelaus.. The fiction in Propertius (1v. 4.) seems to
be a transfer, unwarranted by any tradition, from the story of the Mt>garian
Scylla.
 lllSTORY OF ROME. 175

the hill the fair Tarpeia633 is sitting, covered with gold and jewels,
and bound by a spell; that no one, try as he may, can ever find
out the way to her; and that the only time she had ever been seen
was by the brother of one of the girls. The inhabitants of this
quarter are smiths and common victuallers, without the slightest
touch of that seemingly living knowledge of antiquity, which has
been drawn by other classes of the Romans from the turbid sources
afforded by vulgar books. So that genuine oral tradition has kept
Tarpeia for five and twenty hundred years in the mouth of the
common people, who for many centuries have been totally strangers
to the names of Clrelia and Cornelia.
The Sabines next attempted to storm the city: it was on the
point of falling; the gods disputed what should be its destiny and
that of the world: Juno, who was adored with peculiar honours at
Cures, was favourable to the Sabines and hostile to the race of
JEneas; she opened a gate, which no human force could shut; but
at the command of Janus a boiling spring gushed forth, and repelled
the assailants*.
The next morning Romulus made an equally fruitless attack on
the lost fortress : but it was not in yain that he vowed a temple to
the flight-staying Jupiter, when his troops had been repulsed and
had fled to the gate at the bottom of the Palatium. During the
whole day victory continued to shift from one army to the other, and
neither despaired of securing it: when the Sabine women, no longer
wishing for revenge, the time of which was past, but for a recon­
ciliation between the fathers of their children and their own, rushed
in betwixt the contending armies and brought about a peace. The
two nations were to be inseparably united into the one state of the
Romans and the Quirites, each however continuing distinct and
under its own king.: their temples and religious ceremonies were
to be common to both.
The women had been the preservers of Rome: Romulus re­
warded them with honours for themselves and the whole class of
matrons. The curies were called by the names of the Sabine
wives : an exemption was guaranteed to ~hem and to all married
women for ever from every kind of household service except spin­
ning and weaving. Every man was to make way for a matron that
met him; whoever hurt her modesty by a wanton word or look,

633 The expression la bella Tarpeia, like la bella Cen,ci, implies a feeling
of tenderness for an acknowledged criminal.
* Macrobius Satumal. 1. 9.
 176 HISTORY OF ROME.

was guilty of a capital offence; the right of inheriting on the same

footing with a child634 was.conferred on the wife if she wished it:
but if any husband should abuse this parental power, and sell his
wife as he was allowed to sell his child, he was devoted to the in­
fernal gods. He might divorce his wedded wife for adultery, for
poisoning his children, or for counterfeiting the keys entrusted to
her: if he put her away without any of these grounds, one half of
his property was forfeited to the woman he had injured, the other to
the temple of Ceres35 •
The Sabines built a new city on the Capitoline hill which they
had taken and on the Quirinal: Tatius resided on the former, and
dedicated temples there to his native gods. The two kings and
their senates met for important deliberations between the Capitol
and the Palatium; and the ruling houses in their combined assem­
blies must have done the ~ame : hence the name of the Comitium.
Even in tlte old tradition there seems to have been some inconsis­
tency, as to whether Tatius continued to be king of the whole
Sabine nation, or the joint sovereignty was confined to the citizens
of the double city. That sovereignty did not last long: Tatius was
killed, during a national sacrifice at Lavinium, by, some Lauren tines,
to whom he had refused satisfaction for certain acts of violence
committed by some of his kinsmen: his grave was on the Aven­
tine36. Henceforward Romulus ruled over both nations. His dila­
toriness in accepting the atonement offered for the murder of his
colleague brought a pestilence upon the Romans and the Lauren tines,
which did not cease until the guilty persons were delivered up on
both sides.'
This is the end of the heroic lay, which, beginning with the
establishment of the asylum, forms a poetical whole. All the in­
cident<! are related either with determinate and nearly c?nsecutivc

634 By the conventio in manum. See Dionysius n. 25.

35 Plutarch Romul. c. 22. This head of law seetns from all analogy to be
of plebeian origin (see the .text to note 1373) : but the tradition connecting it
with the poetical tale of the Sabine women is unquestionably ancient, and
very plea.sing. When a marriage had been solemnized with the religious
sanction of the confarreatio, a divorce was so difficult a.s to be scarcely possi­
ble ; but the husband might put his guilty wife to death : when the marriage
had not been solemnly contracted, so as to produce the conventio in manum,
the parties were always allowed to separate at discretion.
36 Plutarch Romul. c. 23. There is an evident connexion between this
legend and the statement that the Sabines received settlements on the Aven­
tine from Romulus (Varro in Servi us on lEn. v11. 657) :, it is no less obvious
that the latter arotic from confounding the, Quirites with the pll'bl'ians.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 177

epochs, or without mention of the interval between them, but in

such a way, that in the old tradition they must have been meant to
follow very closely on one anotlier, and to have been accomplished
with great rapidity 68 7. Totally distinct from these events stands the
account of the Etruscan wars in the long period which intervened
before the death of Romulus; a:i account unhistorical, clumsy, fab­
ulous as the romances of chivalry, without the spirit or features of a
poem. One of the campaigns, in which Fidenre is taken, is related
almost precisely in the same way as the capture of the same city in
the year 328 : such transfers from a historical to the mythical age
were frequently resorted to by the barren invention of the annalists.
Another campaign against Veii, after a number of battles, in one of
which more than half the fifteen thousand Etruscans left on the
field fall by the hand of Romulus, is ended by a truce for a hundred
years, purchased by the cession of an extensive territory and of the
saltmarshes near the coast. These wars, spread through a reign of
thirty-seven years, will never enable any one who looks upon these
accounts as historical, to recognize Romulus as the restless warlike
prince, that fame has always described him. For poetry they are
enough: thus in the German national epic poem, the Niebelungen
lay, several years are allowed to elapse without any exploits, after
the hero's fame has once been established.
The poem appears again in its full splendour when Romulus is
removed from the earth: au oetween ii;i a sorry addition.
In the old legend, which Cicero and Livy have preserved in the
greatest purity out of Ennius, there is nothing about the government
of Romulus, which if not unblemished was glorious, degenerating
into violence and tyranny. Tatius it branded as a tyrant: after his
death it makes the rule of Romulus become more legal and milder:
he consulted the senate on all matters, and chastised the refractory,
not with corporal punishments, but with fines of cattle 88 • The
Celeres, whom later writers converted into his body-guard, were
no other than the knights; nor was any thing ever known in early

. 637 ·In the Trojan wa.r the events which· precede the anger of Achilles, are
very far from filling up the nine years that had elapsed : the reader may see
in Dictys (whom by the way I recommend to his attention, among other
things as an imitator of Sallust's style-optimoruni omiulus he is called by the
great Gronovius-) how it was attempted to do this; and may there find an
example of the manner in which epic poetry is often transformed into every·
day history. _
38 For the former point see Ennius, p. 139; for the latter Cicrro de Re
p. II. 8. 9.

r.-x

 178 HISTORY OF ROME.

times of his having been an object of hatred to the senate. Ennius

seems to have represented Mars imploring the father of gods and
men to deliver Ilia and his children; when Jove, to console him for
their inflexible destiny, promised to take up Romulus to heaven 689 •
The time was accomplished; Juno was reconciled to the Trojan
race, as she had been to Hercules. On the pones of Quinctilis, or
on the Quirinalia40 , as the king was reviewing his people, the sun
withdrew its light 41 ; and while the earth wa~ lying in darkness,
Mars descended in a hurricane and tempest, and bore away his per­
fected son in a fiery chariot4 ~ to heaven. The people had dispersed
in consternation: when the daylight returned, they sought anxiously
for their father, the child of the gods, who had brought them forth
into the realms of light43 ; but their lamentation gave way to reli­
gious reverence, when the glorified hero had appeared to Proculus
Julius 44 , and bid him announce that he would watch over his peo­
ple as the god Quirinus.
These are the main features of the traditional tale, as it was held
sacred for centuries by the Romans, and commemorated in sacred
songs. But there came a time when simple faith had lost its
strength, and when the esteem for real history had risen in propor­
tion as the period it comprised was longer, and as the nation's po­
litical character had grown in gre~fness and importance: and then
appeared writers by whom the whole body of the old traditions
was perverted, as was this :particular one in the grossest manner.
These were the writers whom Dionysius and Plutarch mention
with approbation, calling them rational men, who related what was
probable, and held to what was natural45 : and among their number,
the person whom I believe to have introduced this practice, although
it had earlier models among the Greeks, or who at least adopted

639 This explains the verse, Unus erit quern tu tolles ad cmrula creli, p.
:W. Compare Ovid Fast. II. 487.
40 The Quirinalia according to Ovid Fast. II. 475.
41 Cicero de Re p. 1. 16. Solis defectio qum nonis Quinctilibus fuit,
regnante Romulo; quibus-Romulum-tenebris-natura abripuit. Most of
the passages before known on this point are collected by Sca.liger Emend.
Temp. p. 395.
42 Quirin us Martis equis Acheronta fugit; Horace.-Rex patriis astra
petebat equis: Ovid Fast. n. 496.
43 Ennius in Cicero de Re p. 1. 41. If we had the first three books of
Ennius, we should know what sort ofpoet he was.
44 Between the palace ofmonte Cavallo and the Porta. Pia..
45 oi <rd ?r19<tvai-r<t<r<t '>'P"'~on"-oi <r<t µu9..;t~ ,,-4r<r<t '1Ttp1<t1poiit'T•t·
Dionysius. 'TfA>J •i1t6'T,,., ix_6µevo1. Plutar<;h.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 179

it more uniformly than any other annalist, was L. Piso the censor,
a contemporary of the Gracchi; in other respects a worthy and
honourable man, but who in what we know of his annals betrayed
great narrowness o~ mind anrl perversity of judgment. The wish
of these historians was to gain the whole of the mythical age for
history: their assumption, that the poetical stories always contained
a core of dry historical truth : and their system, to bring this core
to light by stripping it of every thing marvellous 6411.
The results of this attempt were extremely various: in the legend
of Romulus the turn was given principally by Livy. The way in
which the poetical tale of Silvia and her children, down to the ven·
geance inflicted on Amulius, was metamorphosed, may be seen in
Dionysius and Plutarch by any who can overcome the disgust
inspired by vulgar dulness conceited of its superiority in wisdom:
Livy has not condescended to mention it, and thereby has con·
demned it to obscurity. Unfortunately he has not treated the ex­
planation of the disappearance of Romulus with the same contempt;
and hence it has taken deep root. That a mortal man should be
clothed with a radiant body and carried up to heaven, was of course
. impossible: but with regard to the secret anecdote, that the senators
had murdered the king during the gloom of a tempest-it was not
even an eclipse-and had torn him piecemeal, as Pentheus was
torn by the Bacc~analians, and had carried away his bloody limbs
hidden under their gowns, here neither was the deed considered
as physically impossible, nor the loathsome scene of mangling
butchery as morally so. In the later writers we cannot help being
suprised at this: but that a story so atrocious should have been
fabricated in ancient Rome, is an instance how the feelings arc
poisoned by party animosity; the patricians were held to be capa­
ble of the worst enormities. The death of Remus was made out
to have been a mischance during a civil feud: the Sabine war grew,
from the contests of a few days, into a tedious hard fought campaign,

646 Happy they who in the sultry days of Augustus could refresh them­
selves with the simplicity of their ancestors! Among those who were inca­
pable of doing so, the dull falsifiers of history are not more offensive than the
men who helped themselves out with a pneumatology, such as we find traces
of in Dionysius : where instead of Mars Gradivus, whose personality they
were ashamed to admit, some demon, " whose existence was generally be­
lieved," is said to have been the deflowerer of Ilia. Men could reconcile
themselves to this kind of belief in goblins, or at least to professing it ; and so
effect a compromise and even an alliance with bigotry.
180 llISTORY OF ROME.

with pitched battles between great armiea. To this war PisoG•7

referred the origin of the Curtian lake, for the sake of ridding Ro­
man history of another heroic legend: according to him Mettus
Curtius,-a Sabine, had almost sunk with his horse into the swamp:
the same Piso exalted Tarpeia from a venal traitress to a heroine,
an utterly thoughtless and mad one indeed, whose intention was
to sacrifice herself for her country 48 •
To such lengths could even .honest men go, when devoid of un­
derstanding, of feeling, and of judgment: but after these had paved
the way, came the shameless forgers, whose traces are especially
visible in the numbers. Livy himself, when speaking in general
terms, treats the enormous numbers fabricated by Valerius Antias
with contempt, though he is not on his guard against them in par­
ticular cases: as worthless as any is his statement .and that of
Juba about the number of the ravished virgins 49 ; and his silly ex­
aggerations are equally manifest in the numbers of the' armies during
the Sabine war, and that of the military force which Romulus had
at his command before his death 50,
I am sorry to have been obliged to say so much on such wretch­
ed subjects: but it is important to show the nature of that idol,
before which, so liable is fashion to change, our posterity may
perhaps be required hereafter to bend the knee.
I return to the old legend. Th!! senate at first would not allow
the election of a new king: every senator was to enjoy the royal
power in rotation as interrex. In this way a year passed; the
people, being more oppressively treated than before, were vehe­
ment in demanding the election of a sovereign to protect them:
when the senate had permitted it to be held, the Romans and Sa­
bines disputed out of which nation the king should be chosen.
It was adjusted that the former should elect him out of the latter,
and all voices concurred in naming the wise and pious Numa Pom­
pilius of Cures; to whom Tatius had married his daughter.
The discourse on the early history of Rome which Cicero puts

647 Varro de 1. 1. 1v. 32. p. 41.

48 She is described as having planned to make the Sabines deliver up
their arms and armour to her by virtue of their oath, and to consign them
when thus disarmed to the Romans: the arms were to be laid down on the
Capitol, where not a Roman, except some prisoners perhaps, was to be found.
Dionysius 11. 36. It is not superfluous to show the extreme stupidity of
much that would fain pass for history.
49 Plutarch Romul. c. 14. Dionysius 11. 30. 47.
50 46,000 foot, and about 1000 horse: Dionysius 11 16.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 181

into the mouth of Scipio, is entirely taken from Polybius: con­

sequently Polybius found the persuasion, that Numa had been
the disciple of Pythagoras, very generally diffused in his time ;
indeed so diffused at Rome that he tried to prove the impossibility
of the fact by a chronological deduction, which was borrowed from
him by Dionysius. The same persuasion then probably was al~o
expresed by Cato, who, even though acquainted with the chronolo­
gical tables of Eratosthenes, might very possibly be ignorant of the
age of Samian Pythagoras. Uufortunately Polybius can hardly
have learnt, that by oriental writers Pythagoras was referred to the
reign of Assarhaddon65 1, who was co•temporary with Numa. An
impartial critic, who does not believe that the son of l\:Inesarchus
alone is to be regarded as Pythagoras ; or that what Aristoxenus
and the older writers left undecided, has been settled by chronolo­
gers having made up their minds on the question; or that there is
any kind of necessity for placing Numa in the twentieth Olympiad;
or in fine that the historical personality of Pythagoras is more cer­
tain than that of Numa; one who so thinks will be pleased witf1
the old popular opinion, and will not sacrifice it to chronology.
The senate, when in the Samnite war it erected a statue to Pytha­
goras as the wisest of the Greeks*, must probably have also looked
upon him as the teacher of Numa: the Greek books found in
Numa's grave are said to have contained Pythagorean doctrinest:
the JEmilii traced their origin to a son of the Grecian sage. On
the Greek side of the account quoted from Epicharmus 59 , that the
Romans had conferred the franchise of their city on Pythagoras,
would be extremely important, could the work containing it be
considered as genuine: even if spurious, it is evidence of a current
opinion, that the influence of the Pythagoreans had penetrated to
Rome.
·when Numa was assured by the auguries that the gods ap­
proved of his election, the first care of the pious king was directed,
not to the rites of the temples, but to human institutions. Ile
divided the lands which Romulus had conquered and had left open
to occupancy: he founded the worship of Terminus. All ancient
legislators, and above all Moses, rested the result of their ordinances
for virtue, civil order, and good manners, on securing landed pro­
perty, or at least the hereditary possession of land, to the greatest
possible number of citizens. It was not till after he had done this
6.'\l Abydenus, in the chronicle ofEusebius, Venet. ed. 1. p. 53.
* Plutarch Numa c. 8. p. 65. d. t Livy XL. 29. Pliny xm. 27.
52 From a prose work: Plutarch Numa c. 8.
 182 UlSTORY OF ROME.
that Numa applied himself to legislate for religion. He was revered
as the author of the Roman ceremonial law. Instructed by the
Camena Egeria, who was espoused to him in a visible form, and
who led him into the assemblies of her sisters in the sacred grove 853 ,
he regulated the whole hierarchy; the pontiffs, who by precept and
chastisement kept watch that the laws relating to religion should
be observed both by individuals and by the state; the augurs, whose
calling it was to afford security for the counsels of men by piercing
into those of the gods; the flamens, who ministered in the temples
of the supreme deities; the chaste virgins of Vesta; the Salii, who
solemnized the worship of the gods with armed dances and songs.
He prescribed the rites with which the people, might offer such
worship and prayer as would be acceptable to the gods. To him
were revealed the conjurations for compelling Jupiter himself to
make known his will by lightnings and the flight of birds; whereas
others were forced to wait for these prodigies from the favour of
the god, who was often silent to such as were doomed to destruc­
tion. This charm he had learnt from Faun us and Picus, whom by
the advice of Egeria he had enticed and bound in chains, as Midas
bound Silenus in the rose garden. From the pious prince the god
brooked this boldness.: at the entreaty of Numa he exempted the
people from the terrible duty of offering human sacrifices: but
when the audacious Tullus presumptuously imitated his predeces­
sor, he was killed by a flash of lightning during his conjurations in
the temple of Jupiter Elicius. The thirty-nine years of N urria's
reign, which glided away in quiet happiness, without any war,
without any calamity, afforded no legends but of such marvels.
Thatinothing might break the peace of his days, the ancile fell
from:heaven when the land was threatened with a pestilence, which
disappeared as soon as Numa had ordained the ceremonies of the
Salii. Numa was not a theme of song, like Romulus; indeed he
had enjoined, that among all the Camenre the highest honours
should be paid to Tacita. · Yet a story was handed down, telling
how, when he was entertaining his guests, the plain food in the
earthenware dishes was transformed on the appearance of Egeria
into a banquet fit for gods in vessels of gold; to the end that her
divinity might be made manifest to the incredulous. The temple
of Janus, his work, continued always shut; peace was spread over
all Italy; until Numa, like the darlings of the gods in the golden
age, fell asleep, full of days: Egeria melted away in tears into a
fountain.

653 Below S. Balbina, near the Laths of Caracalla.

 BEGINNING AND NATURE OF THE EAR­

LIEST HISTORY.

h was recorded by the keepers of the Sibylline books, that. the

first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated
in the year 208; and that from that time forth it always recurred
after an interval of 110 years, such being the duration of a secle 654 •
This statement is at variance with the accounts in the annals, which
recorded the celebration of the secular festivals in very different
years: but, though the annalists 'Yould have no weight at all, if they
really stood in contradiction to the authentic books, we need not
suppose that the books noted down any thing more than the close
of a secle, and the. epoch when, by the precepts of the ceremonial
law, the beginning of a new one should have been solemnized by
the people, in gratitude for the continuance of its existence into a'
new period; and they probably did so without regarding whether
the celebration was deferred from peculiar circumstances, as was
so often the case with a festival vowed ta the gods.
If we go back following the same principle from that first secu­
lar epoch of which a historical register was preserved, the end or'
the first, or rather the beginning of the second secle, falls in the
year of the city 78. I say, the beginning of the second: for it is
evidently beyond comparison more probable, that the beginning of
a new period should have been celebrated with a joyful solemnity,
-as it was by the Aztecans 55, by whom the renewal of their secle
was looked forward to with anxious doubt,-than the end of an
expiring one, which, like all decease and termination, must rather
have excited melancholy feelings. Now according to the chrono­
logy of the pontiffs this year was the first in the reign of Tullus
Hostilius: according to the pontiffs, I say; for their table was

G54 Ct'nsorinus, c. 17. 55 See the text to note 726.

184 lIISTORY OF ROME.
adopted by Polybius in his Roman chronology 658 , and he is the
authority followed by Cicero in fixing the years of the Roman
kings 57. It was the pontiffs therefore, who, as Scipio does in
Cicero, assigned seven and thirty years to Romulus, nine aud
thirty to Numa 58 , between whom falls the year of the interreign;
whereas Livy and Dionysius reckon forty-three years for Numa.
This is now ascertained by the positive testimony of Cicero:
when I first undertook these inquiries, it was to be divined, with
the help of some boldness, from a trace, not indejld a very distinct
one, in Saint Jerom's translation of the chronicle .of Eusebius,
where 240 years are assigned to the reigns of the seven l{oman
kings, forty to Numa, and thirty-eight to Romulus 59. It is true,
the number of years did not come out precisely right ; and this
might appear to the overcautious a sufficient ground for shrinking
from the application and inference as rash: the certainty we have
now accidentally obtained by the discovery of the books on the
Republic, furnishes a proof that, with regard to those accounts
which have been preserved from ancient times only by ill informed
and hasty compilers, the injury they have suffered in passing
through such hands, ought not to be allowed to determine the only
shape in which we are to make use of them. In numberless cases
the original form is not too much disfigured to be guessed at: there
may frequently be hazard in such a process; but that which will
not admit of being abused, is good for nothing.
The light which I gained in a fortunate hour with regard to the
seemingly inexplicable discrepancies in Roman chronology, arose
from my remarking that the ground on which Fabius differed from
Cato, lay in his reckoning only 240 years for the time of the kings :
and for this I was indebted to the second book of the chronicle of
Eusebius. This taught me the importance of those tables, which
in great part represent the views of Apollodorus; and it would
border on ingratitude, were I to suppress the opinion I once deli­
vered on them, in consequence of the chronicle having been super­
656 In Dionysius, 1. 74, the text runs: e:>rl ..-oil :>r<t.prt. ..-.;, 'Ai'X.l1Ttu1T1
'"'~hou :>rlr<tx.G,-'l"MV ,,,.,.....,, a:>rO">..<t~•'iv.
But no such town as Anchise pro­
bably ever existed save in Cephalmi's brain; assuredly it did not in the age
of Polybius. The inhabitants of Anxur he calls Tarracinites. Three Vatican
manuscripts give d.j-X,l1TT1uo-1: I read .<pX,Hp•ii..1, which word Polybius uses for
the pontiffa (xxrn. 1. 2. xxxn. 22. 5.), though Dionysius calls them i1pof<r~µom,
and not for the supreme pontiff alone.
57 This he says expressly de R~ p. 11. 14.
58 Cicero de Re p. 11. 10. 14.
59 Chronicon in ThPs. Tempor. Scaligeri, n. 1265, 1:103. 1304.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 185

seded as to this point by the unhoped for 1iscovery of a purer

source. A similar discovery, which has almost entirely brought
back to light the part of the chronicle then wanting, is a call upon
our age to recognise its value, and to resume researches too much
neglected since the time of that great man, who laboured at restoring
the work of Eusebius with the confident strength of genius and
with immeasurable learning 660 , cheered and rewarded by the com­
munications of Casaubon. If in the instance before us he over­
looked what was concealed in a tradition the nature of which had
been misunderstood, it was because the abundance of his materials
was inexhaustible even for him, so that a gleaning has been left for
our inferior generation.
Now however that we find the year of Numa's death was
considered as the last in the first secle of the city, another tradi­
tion, which otherwise sounds strange and unmeaning, acquires
·a, definite import ; the tradition that he was born on the day of
the founding of Rome 61 • It was grounded on the Etruscan no­
tion of the first physical secle terminating with the death of the
person who lived the longest among all such as were born on
the day when the city was founded 62• Now the very clearness
with which this is apparent, makes it the more necessary for me to
meet an objection which an able reader might raise. Such a one
might probably remark, that, if 240 years were reckoned for the
time of the kings, and 120 from the beginning of the consulate
down to the taking by the Gauls, the year this would give for the
founding of the city, would be the one adopted by Fabius, 01. 8. I;

660 Scaliger stood at the summit of universal solid philological learning,

in a degree that none have reached since; and so high in every branch of
science, that from the resources of his own mind he coulll comprehend, apply,
and decide on whatsoever came in his way. What, when compared with
him, is the book-learned Salmasius? And why does not France set up the
name of Scaliger to match that of Leibnitz?
Out of Italy and Greece there is no ground more sacred in the eyes of a
philologer, than the hall of the university at Leyden; where the portraits of
the professors, from Scaliger in his princely purple, down to. Ruhnkenius, are
ranged around that of the great William of Orange, the father of the Univer­
sity; the erection of which was granted to the request of Leyden, as the
noblest reward for her more than human endurance and perseverance. The
general of the republican city, Baron Nordwyk, was also a great philologer..
61 Plutarch Numa c. 3. Dion Cassius fr. 20. p. 8. Dionysius would
have been ashamed ofseeming to believe the marvellous coincidence~ but_ he
takes advantage of the belief of others to slip Numa's age, not far from forty,
by a sleight of hand into his history. 11. 58. .
62 See above, p. 104.
J,-y
 186 HISTORY OF ROME.

yet that between the year 78 according to Fabius and 298 ac­
cording to Varro there intervened not 220 years, but only 214: so
that we should be deluded here by an appearance which is merely
accidental.
Nevertheless it is no deception: but the Fasti for the first fifty
years of the republic are in complete disorder ; and this may partly
have been a consequence of. their being adapted to the scheme
which estimated the period under the consuls at a third of the
whole time computed to have elapsed between the building and the
taking·-0f the city: but it may also have been to some extent una­
voidable fro~ the nature of the Fasti themselves. A given number
of official yeat3 did not by any means answer, to the same number
of astronomical; on account of the interreigns, so very frequent in
the earlier ages, by which the beginning of the year was carried
further forward every time. This led those into error, who, like
Fabius, made the two series of years parallel· to each other; but
the secle supplied the correction; this was known to the Pontiffs,
and through them to Polybius and Cato. According to the for­
mer, who dates t~e Gallic invas~on a year later than Dionysius 668 ,
· the secular year 298 was 01. Bl. 3: if from this point two secles,
55 Olympiads, are reckoned backward, the second secle begins in
01. 26. 3: which according to Polybius was the seventy-eighth
, year of Rome, and the first of king Tullus. I again remind the
reader that his statement is taken from the tables of the Pontiffs.·
Hence it seems perfectly evident, that the pontiffs themselves
distinguished the first two kings from ·the rest, as belonging to
another order of things, and separated the accounts of them from
those which were to pass for history; just as the Egyptians began
the lists of their kings with gods and demigods. Romulus was a
god, the son of a god; Numa a man, but connected with superior
beings. If the tradition however about them both is in all its parts
a poetical fiction, the fixing the pretended duration of their reigns
can only be explained by ascribing it either to mere caprice or to
numerical speculations: and although to us the former solution
might seem the more probable, the latter is far likelier to be the
correct one with regard to the ancients in early times ; above all
,where the annals were in the hands of a learned priesthood. Such
speculations characterize the chronology of Asia. Much that I
have already said, and other remarks which I shall make hereafter,
render it almo3t certain that the chronology of the Etruscans, the

663 That is, in 01. 98. 2.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 187

sages of ancient· Rome, was of a similar character. The cyclical

year, which is assumed to have been instituted by Romulus, and
to have obtained until Numa, was <livided into 38 nundines: it was .
an obvious thought to reckon the same number of years from the
beginning of the city to Numa. One of these was taken for the
interreign ; and only 37 were left for Romulus. Then, if twice 38
were to be allotted to the first two kings, 39 fell to Numa' s share ;
an<l this .number ha<l more than one attraction to recommend it. In
its component parts, thrice ten and thrice three, the prevailing num­
ber is that which determines the proportions in all the earliest Ro­
man institutions ; and the nearest quotient obtained from dividing
the number of days in the lunar year, 354, by 9, is 39. Such
numeric.al combinations are mere child's play or juglery: in the
present case however we have nothing.to expect but priestly sub­
tilty, which betrays perverted ingenuity much oftener than depth
of thought•• The other statement, which assigns forty-three years
to Numa, brings the length o( his life to eighty-one; the biquadrate
of three. 1'Vhen it was forgotten that this was the source of that
latter number, even Cato in his time might prefer it; because it
enabled him to carry back four years, for which he could find no
consuls, from the annual Fasti to the time of the kings : others
might be glad to take away the obvious appearance of a fabrication
from the numbers 240 and 120.
With Tullus Hostilius we reach the beginning of a new secle;
and of a narrative resting on historical ground, of a kind totally dif­
ferent from the story of the preceding period. Between the purely
poetical age, the relation of which to history is altogether irrational,
and the thoroughly historical age, there intervenes in all nations a
mixed age, which, if one wishes to designate it by a single word,
may be called the mythico-historical. It has no precise limits; but
comes down to the point where contemporary history begins: and
its character is the more strongly marked, the richer the nation has
been in heroic lays,' and the fewer the writers who have filled up
the void in its history from monuments, and authentic documents,
neglecting those lays, and without calling up in their minds any
distinct image of the past. . Hence in the history of the middle ages
we find such a character in Scandinavia and in. Spain; whereas
during the same period the history of countries which, like Italy,
possess no historical lays, scarcely contains a trace of it. Among th~
Greeks, the Persian war still displays the character of a free epical
narrative; and almost every thing before it that is stirring and attrac­
tive in their story, is poetry. In Roman history the range of pure
188 HISTORY OF ROME.

fiction does not reach much lower ; although it appears again from
time to time even down to the fifth century : the disease which
preys on this history until the war with Pyrrhus, when foreigners
at least began to write it contemporaneously, is stu.died alteration.
This is sheer corruption : the poetical story is something different
from, but it is also something better than pure history, on the field
of which we only find again what wearies and worries us in life 664 •
The relation which such poetical history bears to mythology, is,
that the former always has and must have a historical foundation;
that it borrows its materials mainly from history, as transmitted in
free oraf narrative: while the latter takes hers from religion and
from poems on a larger scale, and does not profess to be a possible
history of the common order of things in the world ; although, so
long as it confines itself to the earth, it can have no other theatre.
To the latter kind for instance belong Hercules, Romulus, and
Siegfried; to the former Aristomenes, Brutus, and the Cid.
On the confines of mythology the predominant character is poeti­
cal, at the opposite end historical. Of the me~ named during the
period we are entering on, but few are imaginary: many of the
chronological statements from the yearly registers ha~e all the de­
finiteness that can be expected for so dim an age: but the historical
part of our information is limited to this. For when historians
arose, their attention was exclusively directed to what bore the name
of annals : no use was made of monuments and orignal documents ;
perhaps through carelessness ; perhaps because they could not be
brought to agree with the poetical legends; aµ.d nobody knew yet how
to appreciate the value of a fragmentary history drawn from authen­
tic documents. Among the Greeks, Ephorus in later times and the
authors of the Atthids framed histories from materials of this kind;
as did Timams, who however is frequently dishonest, concerning
Italy and Sicily; histories like many that have been written of the
middle ages; valuable indeed, but presenting no lively and distinct
image of the times: at Rome this source was but sparingly employed;
and perhaps by none but L. Cincius and C. Macer with judgment
and any degree of industry. It is true, the Roman documents of
the earliest period were scanty, in comparison with the historical
treasures of Athens and of almost all the Greek cities. For a long
time the laws were only engraven on oaken tables 65 , or painted on

6G4 It was not till yet later, about the age of Alexander, that Lysistratus
began to take portraits in sculpture: till then statues had been ideal works,
only preserving the main features of the face and figure.
65 Dionysius 111. 36.
 HISTORY OF ROME. ' 189

them, if they were plastered; and thus they became a prey to the
flames the more easily at the taking by the Gauls, when none had
time or presence of mind to save even the fundamental laws. The
only original documents· mentioned of the whole period under the
kings, are the treaty of Servius Tullius with the Latins 688 , that of
the last Tarquinius with the Gabines, and one with the Sabines 6 7.
That with the Gabines was painted on a wooden shield. Verrius
Flaccus cited the commentaries of Servius Tullius, which appear to
have contained the substance of the constitutional laws ascribed to
him 88 : and the collection of the laws of the kings, compiled by one
Papirius, seems unquestionably to have been of high antiquity.
From the period immediately following the expulsion of the kings,
beside the twelve tables, some other laws, and the compacts between
the patrician and plebeian orders, there were still extant in the
seventh and eighth centuries, the treaties with Carthage69 , with the
Latins7°, and with the Ardeates7 1 : but the contents of these very
documents are such as either cannot be reconciled at all with our
historical accounts, or not without difficulty.
I am now come to the question so often raised as to the genuine­
ness and credibility of the original annals ; · a question, the discus­
sion of which has been placed on a firm ground, such as our pre­
decessors were destitute of, by the fortunate discoveries which have
enriched philology in our days.
It is well known to have been a custom, manifestly derived from
very ancient times, for the chief pontiff to note down the" events of
the year on a whited table; such as prodigies, eclipses, a pestilence,
a scarcity, campaigns, triumphs, the deaths of illustrious men; in a
word, what Livy brings together at the end of the tenth book, and
usually 'in such as remain of the following ones, when closing the
history of a year, in the plainest words and with the utmost brevity;
this statement was so dry that nothing could be more. jejune'!J: the
table was then set up in the house of the pontiff73 : the annals of the
several years were afterward collected in books. This custom ob­
tained until the pontificate of P. Mucius and the times of the Grae~.
chi; when it ceased, because a literature had now been formed, and
perhaps because the composing such chronicles seemed too much
below the dignity of the chief pontiff.

666 Dionysius 1v. 26.

67 The former by Dionysius IV. 58; both by Horace Ep. n. I. 25.
68 Festus v. procum, and pro censu. 69 Polyb. 111. 22.J
70 Dionysius v1. 95. • 71 Livy IV. 7; from Licinius Macer.
72 Cicero de Leg. 1. 2. 73 Cicero de Orat. II. 12.
 190 . HISTORY OF ROME.

Now I grant, Antonius says in Cicero, that this custom had sub­
sisted from the beginning of the Roman state: but it does not follow
from this that Cicero meant to assert, the annals in the possession of
the Roman historians, who did not begin to wi:ite till so late, reached
thus far back. Those of the earlier times might have perished;
which Livy and other ancient writers, though without specific men­
tion of the Annales Maximi, state to ·have happened at the destruc­
tion of the city by the Gauls. And certainly this fate may easily
have befallen them at that time; as the tables perhaps were not yet
transferred into books ; and it is still less likely that any transcripts
of such books should have been in existence: besides possibly they
may not have been preserved in the Capitol, where the chief pon­
tiff did reside, and where there was no occasion for him to keep
his archives, as there wa~ for the duumvirs of the Sibylline books.
I think we may now consider it certain that those annals did
really meet with such a fate at that time, and that they were re­
placed by new ones. Cicero says, the earliest eclipse of the sun
that the Annales Maximi reeorded as having been observed, fell on
the nones of June about the year 350: the earlier ones were com­
puted backward from this point, unto that during which Romulus was
carried up to heaven 674 , From a fragment of Cato we learn that
eclipses of the sun· and moon belonged essentially to the contents of
the pontifical annals; and the fact of their having been computed
backward agrees with this statement, and shows that an 11ttempt was
made to replace the loss of the actual observations : the same thing
has been done in the Chinese chronicles, for the times the annals
of which are said to ha~e existed, but to have been destroyed. The
eclipse spoken of by Cicero was not visible at Rome: but the Ro­
mans derived information from Gades of the day and hour when it
occurred, as well as of the accidental circumstance that the sun was
obscured when. it set, which made it memorable. The list of

674 De Re p. I. 16. Hae in re tant3. inest ratio atque sollertia, ut ex hoc

die, quem apud Ennium et in maximis Annalibus consignatum videmus, su­
ptNiores solis defectiones reputatre sint usque ad illam qure nonis Quinctilibus
fuit regwmte Romulo, &c. Before this passage had been restored to light, I
proved by cogent reasons, that there were no contemporary pontifical annals,
before the battle of Regillus at the earliest: those reasons are now superflu­
ous. Whether according. to the imperfect method then used, the computa­
tions came out right, is another question; who was to verify them? But it is
extremely probable that an erroneous computation of this kind was the ground
by which the date of the death of Romulus was determined.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 191

eclipses observed does not begin till after the restoration of the
city67S,
Now if the earlier aunals were not genuine, but restored, this
accounts for the singular peculiarities in the numerical calcula­
tions throughout the early part of Roman history, and fo~ their
reference to the epoch of the taking by the Gauls. Not that all
the Fasti and year books were destroyed in that calamity; parts of
them must have been preserved in the Capitol, and in the Latin
towns ; and such genuine documents were incorporated: but we
must not look for great diligence of research from the pontiffs, nor
even for any anxious painstaking about historical accuracy, where
they could answer their purpose by numerical combinations: the
mischief was, that their work was esteemed authentic, and soon
exclusively so.
According to the chronology of Fabius, the Roman history from
the founding to the taking of the city splits into two portions, of
240 years under the_ kings, and 120 after them; or, to express it
differently, into three periods 676 , each containing ten times twelve
years; twelve being the number of the birds in the augury of Ro:­
mulus. This outline was the bed of Procrustes, to which what­
ever was known or believed about the early ages was fitted. There
was a statement that a secular festival had been celebrated some
70 years before: Romulus, Numa, and the five succeeding kings,
were the subjects of manifold legends and traditions ; but, except
perhaps as to the last king, they were without any chronological
definiteness. · '
Now the priests who arranged the annals, fixed the reigns of

675 Cicero de Re p. 1. 16. Ut (Ennius) scribit anno cccL fore post Ro­
mam conditam-nonis Junis soli luna obstetit et nox. The profound investi·
gations carried on by Mr Heis of Cologne under the guidance of my friend
Mr Munchow, have set it beyond a doubt that the eclipse referred to can be
no other than the one which occurred on the 21st of June in the astronomical
year 3!J9, B. C. but which at Rome did not fall till after sunset. At Gades,
where more than eleven digits were obscured, the middle of it took place
three minutes before sunset; aud this gives an unexpected accuracy to the
words s<>li luna obstetit et nox, which now cease to be tautological. That the
nones should fall on the 21st is no way surprising, considering the practice of
intercalating : nor is it more so, that the observation taken at Gades should
be known at Rome. A more than ordinary regard for astronomy is implied
in the worship paid at Gades to the year and the month as divinities : see
note 851.
76 As the life of Moses is divided into three periods of 40 years a piece:
and the genealogy in St Matthew divid~s into three parts, each containing
fourteen generations. ·
1!)2 HISTORY OF ROME.
Romulus and Numa, according to the numerical speculations al­
ready explained, at 77 years: this formed the first secle, a heroic
one.
Among the seven kings, whose statues stood in the Capitol,
Ancus Marcius was the fourth : and so the middle of his reign was
made to coincide with the middle of the period assigned to the
kings, the end of the year 120. Now it is true, any number of
years might have been allotted to him at discretion: what decided
in favour of 23, was, that this number together with that of the
first secle makes exactly 100; and that 132, the year in which his
reign would thus close, was the number of years of ten months in
a secle. In this way 32 years fell to the share of Tullus•. Now
with a view of getting something that looked like historical num­
bers for the two reigns next to that of Ancus, half a century was
counted from 120 to the end of the elder Tarquinius : and the
reign of Servius was extended to the year 216, without the slight~
est attention to the impossibilities and contradictions occasioned by
so doing; this left five and twenty years for the last king, a date
which may perhaps have been historical677.
It was only necessary that the computation adopted by Polybius
for the years of the kings should be again known, in order that this
web of no very fine texture should come to light, and no longer be
taken for any thing else than what it really is •. In other cases
indeed the chronological statements during a mythico-historical age
may possibly deserve. credit: but as to the period of the Roman
kings, the chronology itself is a forgery ·and a fiction throughout:
there is no rational ground for doubting the personal existence of
Tullus Hostilius; but most assuredly the combat of the Horatii and
the-'king's marvellous death are more ,likely to be historically true,
than the dates assigned to his reign.
While however no national annals were left concerning the times
of the kings, neither did the family narratives reach so far back.
The stories that the V alerii spoke of a V olesus as their ancestor,
that the Marcii traced the origin of their race to Ancus, and other
families to Numa, are no proof to the contrary: the Sabine descent
of the Valerii as a general fact I am ready to admit; but if any
plebeian houses deduced their stock from the kings, nobody could
seriously believe them. Except the Horatii-and as to them it
was disputed whether they belonged to Rome or Alba-not a single
Roman is mentioned by name in the legen"d.s of Tullus and the

677 This nwnbcr is given by Cicero de Re p. n. 18..

 HISTORY OF ROME .. 193

three following kings. · Whereas from the very beginning of the

commonwealth the family histories related much of its great men,
though what they related may not always be worthy of credit.
The arithmetical outline drawn for the time of the kings, before
it became a vehicle for mere fiction, was filled up with two chsses
of subjects ; the forms of the state, its laws, and the institutions
ascribed to particular kings ; ·and legends of their exploits. The
former class seems to have engaged the attention of the earliest an­
nalists but very little, richly as it provided later ages with materials.
The antiquity of the legends is much greater: their origin goes
back far beyond the time when the annals were restored.
That they were transmitted in lays from generation to generation,
and that their contents cannot be more authentic than those of any
other poem preserved by song on the deeds of former times, is not
a new notion. A century and a half will soon have elapsed, since
Perizonius 678 expressed it, and observed that among the ancient
Romans it had been the custom at banquets for the praises of great
men to be sung to tbs flute7 9 ; a fact Cicero only knew of from
Cato, who seems to have spoken of it as a usage no longer subsist­
ing. The guests themselves sang in turn; so it was expected that
the lays, as being the common property of the nation, should be
known to every free citizen. According to Varro, who calls them
old, they were sung by modest boys, sometimes to the flute, some­
times without music 80 • The peculiar function of the Camenre was
to sing the praises of the ancients 81 ; and among th_e rest those of
the kings. For never did republican Rome strip herself of the
recollection of ihem, any more than she removed their statues from
the Capitol : in the best times of her freedom their memory was
revered and celebrated•~.
678 In his Animadversiones Historicre, c. 6. That I did not know this
when I first wrote on the subject, l confess, and not without shame : but at
all events those who combated my opinion were equally ignorai;it.
79 The leading passage is Tusc. Qurest. IV. 2. Gravissimus auctor in
Originibus dixit Cato, morem apud majores hunc epularum fuisse, ut deinceps,
qui accubarent, can!lr~nt ad tibiam clarorum virorum laudes atque virtutes.
Cicero lamel)ts that these songs are lost; Brut. 18. 19. Yet, like the sayings
of Apius the blind, they seem to have vanished only from such as did not care
for them. Dionysius was acquainted with songs abo~t Romulus.
80 , In Nonius 11. 70. assa voce: (aderant) in conviviis pueri modesti, ut
cantarent carmina antiqua, in quibus laudes erant majorum, assa voce, et cum
tibicine.
81 Fest. Epit. v. Camenre, musre, quod canunt antiquorum laudes.
82 Ennius sang of them, and Lucretius mentions them with the highest
honour.
1.-z
194 HISTORY OF ROME.

'Ve are so entirely dependent on the age to which we belong, we

subsist so much in it and through it as parts of a whole, that the
same thought will at one time be sufficient to give us a measure for
the acuteness, the depth, and the strength, of the intellect which
conceives it, while at another it may suggest itself to every body,
and nothing but accident leads one man to anticipate others in ex­
pressing it. Perizonius can have known nothing of heroic lays
except from books : that he should ever have heard of any still
current ip. his days, or written down from the mouth of the common
people, is inconceivable considering his age: he lived long enough
however to hear, and perhaps he heard, but it was not until a quarter
of a century had elapsed since the appearance of his researches, how
Addison roused the stupified senses of his literary contemporaries,
to join the common people in recognizing the pure gold of poetry
in Chevy-chase. For us on the other hand the heroic lays of Spain,
of Scotland, ancl of Scandinavia, had long been our common stock:
the Lay of the Niebelungen had already revived and taken its place
in literature : and now that we listen to the lays pf the Servians,
and to those of Greece, the swanlike strains of a slaughtered nation ;
now that every one knows how poetry maintains its existence in
every people, until metrical forms, foreign models, the various and
multiplying interests of every-day life, and general inertness or
luxury, stifle it so, that poetical minds are the very class whose
genius most rarely finds a vent: while on the contrary minds with­
out poetical genius, but with talents so analogous to it that they
may serve as a substitute, frequently usurp the art : now the empty
objections that have been raised' no longer need any answer. If
any one does not discern the traces of such lays in the epical part of
Roman story, he may continue blind to them: he will be left more
and more alone every day : there can be no going backward on this
point for generations. ·
One among the various forms of Roman popular poetry was ·the
nenia, containing the praises of the deceased, which were sung to
the flute at the funeral processions 683 , as they were recited in the
funeral orations. We are not to suppose that it was like the Greek
threnes and elegies: in the old 'times of Rome the fashion was not
to be melted into a tender mood, and to bewail the dead; but to
pay him honour. We roust therefore imagine the nenia to have
been a memorial lay, such as were sung at banquets: indeed the
latter \Vere perhaps no others than what had first been heard at the

683 Cicero de Legib. 11. 24.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 195

funeral. And thus it is possible that, without being aware of it, we

may possess some of these lays, which Cicero supposed to be
totally lost: for surely a doubt will scarcely be moved against the
thought, that the inscriptions in verse 684 on the oldest coffins in the
sepulchre of the Scipios are nothing else than either .complete ne­
nias, or the beginnings of them 85 • In these epitaphs we find a

684 On the coffin of L. Barbatus the verses are marked and made appa­
rent by lines to part them: in the inscriptions on his son and the flamen there
are as many lines as verses, which may be recognized with as much ci:rtainty
from the great difference in the length of them, as the elegies on mot~ recent
monuments.
85 The three following inscriptions are of this kind: I transcribe them,
because it is probable many of my readers never saw them.
Corneliu' Luciu' Scipio Barbatus,

Gniivo (patre) prognatu', fortis vfr sapiensqu<>,

Quoiu' rorma virtuti parissuma fuit,

Consul, Censor, Aedilis, qui fuit apud vos,

Taurasiam, Cesaunam, Samnio cepit,

Subfoit omnem Lucanaam, /

Obsidesque abducit.

The second is:

Hunc unwn plurimi consentiunt R(omani)

Duonorum optumum f6.isse virum,

Lucium Scipionem, filium Barbati;

Consul, Censor, Aedilis, hie fuit apud vos.

Hie cepit Corsicam, I Aieriamque urbem

Dedit tempestatibus aedem merito.

The third:

Qui apicem I insigne Dialis flaminis gess!sti

Mors perfecit tua I ut essent omnia

Brevia, honos, f'ama, virtusque,

Gloria, atque fogenifun, quibus

Si in longa Iicu1sset tibi Utier vita

Facile fact1s superasses gloriam majorum

Quare lubens te in gremifun Scipio recipit terra,"

Publi, prognatum Publio Cornelio.

I have softened the rude spelling, and have even abstained :from marking
that the final m in Taurasiam, Cesaunam, Jlleriam, optumum, omnem, and prog­
natum was not pronounced. The short i in Scipio, consentiunt, fuit, fuisse,
a
licuisset, was suppressed, so that Scipio for instance was dissyl!able; a kind of
suppression of which we find still more remarkable instances in Plautus. In
the inscription on Barbatus, v. 2, patre after. Gnai1Jo is beyond doubt an inter­
polation: in that on his son, v. 6, and in the third, v. 1. 2 1 it is to be observed
tliat the last syllable of Corsicam, apicem, tua, is not cut off. In the third I
have transferred si from the end of the third to the beginning of the next line,
and majorum from the beginning of the seventh to the end of the one before
it. Stone masons are inaccurate in every thing, but most of all so in dividing
their lines. ·
196 HISTORY OF ROME.

peculiarity which characterizes all popular ,poetry, and which is

strikingly conspicuous above all in that of modern Greece. Whole
lines and thoughts become elements of the poetical language, just
like single wor<ls: they pass from such old pieces as are in general
circulation, into new compositions; and, even where the poet is not
equal to a great subject, give them a poetical colouring and keep­
ing. So Cicero read on the tomb of Calatinus: hunc plurimf£ con­
sentiunt genies populi primariumfuisse virum686 : we read on that
of L. Scipio the son of Barbatus: hunc unum plurimi consentiunt
R(om«Hi) bonorum optumumfuisse virum.
The poems out of which what we call the history of the Roman
kings was resolved into a prose narrative, were different from the
nenia in form, and of great extent; consisting partly oflays united
into a uniform whole, partly of detached ones without any neces­
sary connexion. The story of Romulus is an epopee by itself: on
Numa there can only have been short lays. Tullus, the story of
the Horatii, and the destruction of Alba, form an epical whole, like
the poem of Romulus: indeed Livy has here preserved a fragment
of the poem unaltered, in the lyrical numbers of the old Roman
verse•7, On the other hand in what is related of Ancus there is not
a touch of poetical colouring. But afterward with L. Tarquinius
Priscus a great p'oem begins, which ends with the battle of Regil­
lus; and this lay of the Tarquins even in its. prose shape is still
inexpressibly poetical; nor is it less unlike real history. The arri­
val of Tarquinius the Lucumo at Rome; his deeds and victories;
his death; then the marvellous story of Servius; Tullia's impious
nuptials; the murder of the just king; .the whole story of the last
Tarquinius; the warning presages of his fall; Lucretia; the as­
sumed idiocy of Brutus; his death; the war with Porsenna; in the
last place, the truly Homeric battle of Regillns; .all this forms an

686 Cicero de Senectute 17.

87 The verses of the horrendum carmen 1. 26.
Duumviri perduellionem judicent.
Si a du~~viris pr~vocarit,
Provocat10ne certato:

Si v1ncent, caput obnubito:

Jnfelici arbore reste suspendito:

v erberato intra vel extra pomoerum.

The description of the nature of the old Roman versification, and of the
great variety of its lyrical metres, which continued in use down to the middle
of the seventh century of the city, and were carried to a high degree of per­
fection, I reserve, until I publish a chapter of an ancient grammarian on the
Sa.turnia.n Verse, which settles the question.
 HISTORY OF HOME. 197

epopee, which in force and brilliance of imagination leaves every

thing produced by the Romans in later times far behind it. · A
stranger to the unity which characterizes the most perfect of Greek
poems, it divides itself into sections, answering to the adventures
in the Lay of the Niebelungen: and should any one ever have the
boldness to think of restoring it in a poetical form, he would com­
mit a great mistake in selecting any other than that of this noble
work.
These lays were much older than Ennius 688 , who moulded them
into hexameters, and found matter in them for three books of his
poem; and who seriously believed himself to be the first of Ronian
poets, because he had contemptuously shut his eyes against the
merits of the old native poetry, and succeeded in suppressing it.
Of that poetry and of its destruction I shall speak elsewhere: here
only one further rema1k is needed. Ancient as the groundwork of
the epical lays unquestionably was, the form they were handed
down in, and a great part of their contents, seem to have been com­
paratively recent. If in the pontifical annals history was adulte­
rated to favour the patricians, this poetry is pervaded throughout by
a plebeian spirit, by hatred of the oppressors, and by evident traces
that at the time when it was sung some plebeian houses were already
great and' powerful. The assignments of land by Numa, Tullus,
Ancus, and Servius, are in this spirit: all the favourite kings are
the friends of freedom: the best of them n,ext to the holy Numa is
the plebeian Servius: the patricians appear in a detestable light, as
accomplices in his murder: Gaia Cecilia, the Roman wife of the
elder Tarquini.us, is a plebeian, a kinswoman of the Metelli: the
founder of the republic and l\focius Screvola are plebeians : among
the other party the only noble characters are the Valerii and Hora­
tii ; houses friendly to the commons. Hence I should be inclined
not to date these poems, the contents of which have come down to
us, before the restoration of the city after the Gallic disaster, taking
this as their earliest age. ThP. middle of the fifth century, the
688 -Scripsere alii rem
Versibu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant':
Quom neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat,
N ec dicti studiosus erat.
Horace's annosa 'l>olumina 'l>atum may have been old poems of this sort:
though perhaps they are also to be understood of prophetical books, like those
of the Marcii; whiCh in spite of his contemptuous glance at them were ex­
tremely poetical. Of this we may judge even from the passages preserved by
Livy, xxv. 12: we must not Jet Horace determine our opinion of them, any
more than of Plautus.
198 HISTORY OF ROME.

golden age of Roman art, may perhaps have also been that of Ro­
man poetry. The same period is also indicated by the consulting
the Pythian oracle. The story of the symbolical manner in which
the last king instructed his son io get rid of the principal men of
Gabii, comes from a Greek tale in Herodotus: so likewise we find
the stratagem of Zopyrus related of S,extus: we must therefore sup­
pose that there was some knowledge of Greek legends ; and why
not of Herodotus himself?
 THE ERA FROM THE FOUNDATION OF

THE CITY.

A COMPUTATION of time, which ascending from a given point

determines its earliest epoch by artificial combinations, may seem
unfit for and unworthy of being used in chronology. But for prac­
tical purposes nothing more is requisite, than that the point it begins
at should be fixed relatively: the first year even of our own com­
mon era is notoriously misplaced: only such chronological deter­
minateness must not be mistaken for historical certainty. The
dignity of Rome purges its era from the blot of having owed its
origin to fraud.
History requires more than one era; Asia a different one from
Europe: such eras as reckon backward, or are necessarily depend­
ent on a supposition ascertained to be utterly wrong, are positively
bad: differ:mt eras are suited to different times ; thus the Spanish
one from the battle of Actium was appropriate so long as the West­
ern empire lasted: afterward it ought to have given way to the
general Christian era much sooner than it did ; as that of N abonas~
sar was very reasonably made to yield to the Seleucidian. The
greater or less value of an era for practical purposes depends on
three qualities: it should begin early enough to comprehend all
such dates as are really historical, within its range in its forward
course: it should be applicable without violence to the history of
the most important nations which come under it: and the reason
which entitles the era to preference, should be something perma­
nent. With regard to the point of their commencement, the Olym­
pic era and that of N abonassar differ little from the Roman.: but
while the last continues to grow more and more extensively appli­
cable, until the battle of Actium; of the two former, the one, like
Greece, does not survive Alexander except as an empty name,
while the other, like Babylon, ceases about the same time altoge­
200 HISTORY OF ROME.

ther. Beyond the epoch assigned to the founding of Rome, the

west of Europe has no chronology at all : for Greece the method
devised. by Eratosthenes, of reckoning from the fall of Troy to indi­
cate relative dates, was a happy thought: for still earlier times in
Greece, when all chronology, except for Asia, is a mere dream, we
may adopt the Babylonian computation, which began 1905 years
before the first year of Alexander's residence at Babylon689, and
which will serve for all Asia on this side of the Indus.
Eras of cities from their foundation were common in Italy: Sca­
liger quotes an inscription proving that such an era was in use at
the Umbrian town of Interamna9°; that a similar one prevailed at
Ameria is shown by the ~hove mentioned statement of Cato*. As
to the Romans, we have no trace of their reckoning their years in
this way before the time of Augustus. On the other hand an era
from the banishment of the kings occurs frequently; it was espe­
cially usual to employ this for dating alterations in the constitution.
This is done by Cicero, by Tacitus, and even by Gaius 91 ; a coin­
cidence, which affords ground for conjecturing that such alterations
were similarly recorded. in some writer.followed by all the three;
and this was probably no other than Junius Gracchanus, who wrote
in the first half of the seventh century.
Dionysius assumed that this mode of reckoning w.as already in
use about the middle of the fourth century : else he would not have
built on certain registers of the censors, which designated the year
before the taking of the city to be the year 119 after the banishment
of the kings 911, as on authentic documents. But, admitting the
genuineness of the registers themselves, still this date may perhaps
not have been set down at the time; it may have been a later addi­
tion, made either innocently or with the design of falsifying the
text: however this certainly proves that the era was used in public
documents, though possibly not till a later age.
In every era the number of years are to be taken as all of the
same kind, whether they be astronomical or lunar years: now since

689 See my Treatise on the historical value of the Armenian Translation

of Eusebius; Kleine Schrlften p. 200.
' 90 Emend. Temp. p. 385. Puteoli reckoned from the foundation of the
colony.
* See p. 108. note 431.
91 In Lydus De Magistratibus r. 27: from whose quotations it appears,
that what we have of Pomponius in the Digests are mutilated and incorrect
extracts from the Introduction to the twelve tables by Gaius.
92 Dionysius 1. 74.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 201

our Fasti enumerate the magistrat~s for 120 years from the begin­
ning of the consulship until the taking of the city, these official
years would answer precisely to just as many of the era. But no
dependence can be placed on the Fasti ; as is sufficiently proved by
Brutus and Horatius being named as colleagues in the treaty with
Carthage 693 : and I shall sHow in the proper place that the consuls
who are made to succeed one another in the first year of the com­
monwealth, in such numbers as never occur again, belong to seve­
ral years •. Moreover in Livy, who yet followed Cato's computation,
during this period the consuls of the years 248, 264, and 265 are
wanting, not to mention slighter variations: still greater discrepan­
cies appear in the Fasti of Diodorus, which, disordered r,s they
appear to be, are still deserving of more attention than they have
received, since the greatest difficulties in them arise from miswrit­
ing. He may have corrupted, but certainly did not invent them.
That the official 'years should answer exactly to those of an era,
became impossible so soon as the time of the magistrates was al­
lowed to expire before their successors were elected. But it seems
to be pretty probable that at first the practice of holding an election
under an interrex was retained from the time of the kings and trans­
ferred to the consuls: at least it very easily and very frequently
happened, that the outgoing m·agistrates did not complete the elec­
tion, and that an interreign took place. Now since the new magis­
trates nevertheless continued in office a full year 94, two official
years were longer than two civil ones, by the length of the inter­
reign. The rule seems to have been, for the new magistrates to
enter upon their office on the calends or ides of a month 95 : hence,
unless matters were accelerated in consequence of any extraordi­
nary circumstances, the commencement of the official year was put
off for half a month, as often as the election was held by an inter­
rex. But often several interreigns followed one up-0n another: we
cannot expect to find them recorded by Livy in the earliest 'times
of the commonwealth, since he very frequently forgets them in the
later.
In this way the divergency between years 0£ the Fasti and civil
years counted regularly on, would have come to this, that, suppos­
ing the beginning of each series coincided in the year 1, at the end
of some fifteen years -perhaps the consuls would not enter upon

693 Polybius m. 22.

94 ·Otherwise the promise made to them in the formulary of their elec­
tion, ut qui optima jurefacti sint, was not kept.
95 Dodwell has shown this to be very probable.
J,-AA.
202 IIISTORY OF ROME.

office before Quinctilis ; so that their time would be equally divided

between the years 15 and 16. If the same order of things conti­
nued, it m'ight happen that the thirtieth pair of consuls would not
ascend the curule throne before the beginning of the year 31; thus
a full year which had actually elapsed, would be lost in the Fasti:
and though this probably did not take place within so short a time,
still it did take place, and more than once. \Ve have here an ana­
logy, except that the deviations were not regular, with the compa­
rison between a chronological series of solar and lunar years.
Hence however we see the purpose· of the ordinance, that the
supreme prntor should drive a nail into the wall in the temple of
the Capitoline J\lpiter on the ides of September. This custom is
said to have been adopted. because writing ·was little used in those
times : yet the names of the magistrates were recorded; else there
could have been no Fasti. But if the object .was to prevent any
years being lost in the record of time, the plan, with all its simpli­
city, was suited to the end. If the ides of September fell during
an interreign, either the consuls who were going out of office before
that day, must have proclai~ed a dictator to perform the ceremony;
or the interrex proclaimed one; and this must then have been con­
sistent with the laws regulating the nomination to the dictatorship.
Every year was marked and numbered.' Now Livy informs us
that this annual nail was driven in for the first time by M. Horatius
at the dedication of the Capitol, and that the ides of September were
the day of the dedication*: this then gave rise to the era reckoned
from that day, which was used at Rome on public monuments in
the middle of the fifth century 696 : and why should it not have been
so much earlier ? In what year after the banishment of the Tar­
quins the dedication fell, was variously s_tated : in fact the era from
the banishment seems to have been made to coincide with this really
ancient one from the dedication ; and the number of years in the
Fasti was brought in to accord with it by the insertion of fabricated
consulships.
I conceive the table seen by Polybius in the archives of the
pontiffst, to have been a ·combination of this table, which beginning
from the dedication of the Capitol named the supreme magistrate
in office on the ides of September in every year, with the chrono­
logical computations deduced by the pontiffs in· their annals from

* vu. 3.
696 By Cn. Flavi us in the inscription on the' chapel of Concord: Pliny
n:xm. 5 : where beyond doubt we should read 204 instead of 304.
t Above, note 656, p. 184.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 203

an arbitrary and artificial arrangement of numbers : and the same

enumeration of ye;rs must have been the groundwork built upon by
Varro, and by the author of the Capitoline Fasti; if he was a differ­
ent person from Varro. It is certainly doing them injustice to
assume, that, where they mark a year with the name of a dictator
and without consuls, their notion was that he presided over the
republic for a whole year: I have no doubt that-except perhaps
in a single peculiar case-they only meant to note, that, during the
interval between two years so marked, the beginning of the official
year had been pushed a twelvemonth forward, and that there were
no consuls on the ides of September. On these points they may
have been mistaken or have allowed themselves liberties in particular
instances : the problem, to refer events from the variable years of
the Fasti to a determinate chronological table, is one we have no
means of solving.
For connecting the Roman chronology with the Grecian, a fixed
point was afforded by the taking of the city. That event, the con­
sequence of a national migration that rushed on \vith the rapidity of
a torrent and threatened the remotest regions, had spread conster-.
nation as far as the Greek cities, and had even excited attention at
Athens*: so it might be known with certainty, that it had happened
in 01. 98. 1 or 2. The majority decided for the former year, the
archonship of Pyrgion 69 7; Polybius and Diodorus for the latter.
Now a person who, following the chronological outline I have
described, without attending to the Capitoline era and the com­
mencements of the secles, reckoned 360 years from 01. 98. I, up
to the building of the city, would place it in 01. 8. 1. Such is the
computation of Fabius98 •
He that reckoned back from 01. 98. 2, adopting the above-men­
tioned corrections, would come to 01. 7. 2. This is the computa­
tion of Polybius99 and of Nepos7° 0 • \Vith regard to the former
however we must take into consideration his ·general practice in
comparing Olympiads with Roman years; which is such, that,
although ,the Palilia fell before the summer solstice, he would reckon

·* Plutarch Camillus c. 22.

697 Dionysius 1. 74: probably after Theopompus or Aristotle.
98 Dionysius 1. 74: according to the Vatican MS.
99 Dionysius 1. 74. Cicero de Re p. n. 10.
700 Solinus 2. His mention of Eratosthenes and Apollodorus can only
refer to Nepos having adopted their canon for Troy and the beginning of the
Olympiads: for Eratosthenes wrote tha.t Romulus was the grandson oflEneas.
See above n. 5!J8.
204 HISTORY OF ROME.
the second year of the' seventh Olympiad as coinciding with the
first of the city, which had already begun; for thus it is that he
makes the first year of his history, 01. 140. 1, answer to 532 of the
city.
If any one reckoned in the same way, only beginning from 01.
98. 1, he would take 01. 7.1 for thP. year of the building: Cato did so.
But a difficulty now arose about the mode of inserting the four years
obtained from the corrections. The more clearly a person perceived
the nature of this chronology, the readier he was to adopt the short­
est solution. Hence Polybius, while he took that statement as to
the years of the several reigns, which made the sum of them amount
to ·240, added the four year3 to this sum, as having been filled up
by interreigns7°1 ; so that the first consular year fell in 01. 68. 19 •
Whether Cato had set him the example in this, or reckoned, as
.Livy does, 43 years for the reign of Numa, cannot be ascertained.
The former method is unquestionably far preferable; since it makes
no alteration in the several old numbers, and yet affo~ds the same
advantage of enabling us to take the years of the Fasti and the
chronological yeari! for one another : hence I too have adopted it.
The proceeding of Diodorus is altogether absurd: he must have
reckoned 61 Olympiads for the time of the kings, but began from
the eighth 3 : so that he jumbled together the calculations .of Poly­
bius and Fabius.
A singular misunderstanding, which I shall clear up in the se­
cond volume of this history, misled Varro to suppose that the tak­
ing of the city should be placed three years earlier, in 01. 97. 2 :
one of these years was set off against the difference in Cato's com­
putation; the result however was that he placed the founding of
Rome in 01. 6. 3.
All these diverging chronological statements have a common
ground: Ennius, who reckoned about seven hundred years from the
fou~dation of Rome to his own time, stood on one entirely differ­
ent. Varro censures him for his calculation as a gross error4 : and

701 Cicero de Re p. n. 30. His regiis quadraginta annis et ducentis

paulo cum interregnis fore amplius prrnteritis.
2 Polybius n1. 22. Ilponp"- .,.~, Zip'ou J,.,_p,rz:.,,..,,,, ,j, .,.~, 'EMotrf« ""P'"-"
xon' herr1 i.i17rourr1 Juo'ir : that is, 28 years before OJ. 75. 1.
3 As the five books before the eleventh are missing, this can only be
proved by inference; from the consuls, who i~ Dionysius fall in OJ. 75, 76 1
and so on, standing in the annals of Diodorus under 01. 76. 77, and so on.
4 Varro de Re Rustica m, 1. ·
Septingenti sunt paulo plus vel minus anni,
Augusto Augurio postquam incluta condita Roma 'st.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 205

certainly, according to all the above mentioned systems, about 120

years were wanting of that number, when Ennius wrote the last
books of his Annals. Still it is always a mistake, to attribute igno­
rance on subjects of general notoriety to eminent men, in order to
account for any thing we find in them that runs counter to the cur­
rent opinion; and such a charge only brings shame on the person
who utters it. Further on I shall propose another solution, by
which the father of Roman poetry would be justified from the cause
usual in such cases ; his knowing more than his censurer : the
. simplest explanation however seems to be this. If a person, ad­
hering to the old Latin chronological expression, that Rome was
built 333 years after the fall of Troy1os, adopted the Greek state­
ment as to the date of the latter event, the era from the building of
Rome, according as he followed Eratosthenes or Timreus 6 , would
be carried about 100 or llO years further back than it was by the
writers hitherto mentioned. Supposing that Ennius, who wrote
the last book of his poem in 582, preferred the authority of Timre­
us, and added seven years for the time since the destruction of
Troy, Rome at that time, according to this poetical and national
view, was near upon seven hundred years old; about 699. Every
way it remains equally inexplicable, how he could make Romulm~
the son of Ilia, and not of Silvia.
But if Enniu.s was able to get over this contradiction iri his poem,
neither can it prevent us from supposing Nrevius to have adopted
the same chronological arrangement: indeed he must decidedly
have· done so, if it was after him that Virgil modelled the whole
passage from which we know it. Perhaps there may be an ex­
press testimony on the point, which has escaped me: or on the
other hand Newton, in making Nrevius place the building of the
city a hundred years before the usual epoch7, may have fallen under
the common lot of human nature, and have erred in confounding
him with Ennius.
Cassius Hemina, at the begin~ing of the seventh century, placed
the age of Homer, which Nepos according to the Greek tables
dated 160 years before Rome, more than 160 years after the Tro­
jan war 8 : he must probably have had the same computation in
view.

705 See above p. 156.

6 The former reckoned 407, the Jatter417 years from the fall of Troy to
the first Olympiad.
7 Chronology, p. 129. 8 Gellius xvn. 21.
206 IIISTORY OF ROME.

That the second of the above mentioned chronological schemes*

-was likewise made use of, we find a tolerably sure trace, though it
is mixed up with other things and <li~figured. Eutropius dated the
building of Rome in 01. 6. 3; or, at an avcrage7° 9 , 394 years after
the fall of Troy: these two statements do not coincide according to
any of the opinions concerning the beginning of the Olympiads:
they are entirely .unconnected with each other.· A person who
reckoned the 360 years not from the fall of Ilion, but from the
founding of Alba, and who added the 33 years since the landing of
JEneas, and a year for his voyage, would obtain this number.
. Timceus, writing about 490, placed the foundation of Rome con·
temporaneous with that of Carthage, as Dionysius says, and 38
years before the first Olympiad : the same epoch within a year for
Carthage occurs in other writers, being probably taken from Apol­
lodorus10. This in his tables would be 368, with Timceus 379 years
afte~ the fall of Troy. Supposing however that Timceus did not
reckon backward from the Olympiads, but forward from the taking
of Troy 11 , and mentioned the year 369, and that Dionysius did not
remember that Timmus made the interval between that event and
the first Olympiad longer by ten years than the cturent canon; he
may perhaps have followed that canon in determining the epoch
assigned by Timmus, instead of which he should have fixed it 48
years before the Olympiads. Trogus placed the building of Car·
thage 72 years before that of Rome'~: this, if we date the building
of Rome with Varro in 01. 6. 3, would be exactly 48 years before
the Olympiads: and it is evident that in the history of Sicily.and
the neighbouring countries Trogus followed Timams, at least very
frequently. Thus here again we find the second Latin era, 360:
for the Sicilian annalist certainly never meant to state that there
was a complete coincidence of time in the building of the two cities

~ Above p. 156, note 578.

709 Cellarius has proved that this is the meaning of the singular "phrase,
ut qui plurimum minimumque tradiderunt. The various readings which occur
in several of the manuscripts and old editioll.s, are adulterations introduced
into the Historia Miscella from Orosius: the latter, in ~aking the number of
years 414 (n. 4.), must have been misled by some misunderstanding, which
in such a writer is not worth while to investigate; unless ccccxrv be a mis­
take for CCCXCIV.
10 Dionysius 1. 74. Cicero de Rep. 11. 23. Velleius I. G.
11 Timreus reckoned 600 years from the fall of Troy to the settlement of
Chersicrates in Corcyra: fr. 49 in Goeller's collection.
12 Justin xvm. 6.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 207

which had already begun contending for the superiority, or to de­

termine the age of Rome with exactness.
I think I have sufficiently unfolded the causes of the great varia­
tions in the statements on this point; .variations which have any
thing but a historical ground; There still remains one to be ex­
plained, which differs essentially from all the others, that of L. Cin­
cius Alimentus, who dated the building of the city about the fourth
year of the twelfth Olympiad713 • The questio1t, what occasioned
his departing thus from the table of the pontifls,.which he must
needs have been acquainted with, is the more important, because
Cincius was a really critical investigator of antiquity, who threw
light on the history of his country by researches among its ancient
monuments. He proceeded in this work with no less honesty than
diligence 14 : for it is only in his fragments that we find a distinct
statement of the earlier relation between Rome and Latium, which
in all the annals has been misrepresented by national pride. He
was a senator, and prmtor in the second Punic war, although at the
beginning of it he had had the misfortune to be taken prisoner by
the Carthaginians. That he possessed eminent personal qualities,
such as strike a great man, is clear, inasmuch as Hannibal,. who used
to treat his Roman prisoners very roughly, made a distinction in
his behalf, and gave him an account of his passage through Gaul
and over the Alps, which Cincius afterward incorporated in his
history. Now it is certainly possible that he may have discovered
some Etruscan or Latin chronological tables, which he preferred to
the computation of the pontiffs : but it is more probable that his
account likewise proceeded only from a consideration of the same
statement out of which we have seen so many arise.
That Cincius had written a book on the old Roman calendar, we
are informed by l\1acrobius' 5 : that he had examined into the most
ancient Etruscan and Roman chronology, is clear from Livy 16 •
And it is by supposing him to have paid regard to a very old measure
of time, at a period when it had already gone wholly out of use,
that we are enabled to explain his_ chronological statement com­
pletely. ·
During the earlier ages of my history I cannot avoid inserting
disquisitions as episodes: and I think I have the same right to

713 Dionysius 1. 74. 7repl '1'~ 'TiTttf'Tor t'To~. Solinus 2.

14 For the events of his own time too Livy calls him maximus a'Udor.
XXL 38. ,
15 Saturnalia 1. 12. 16 vu. 3.
208 HISTORY OF ROME.

claim indulgence for them, as the ancient historians had to weave

episodical narratives into their works. That these digressions are
a departure from the character of oral discourse, which history
ought always to bear; that they are merely writings, and can only
be read by the learned in the solit"\]de of the closet; is an unavoida­
ble disadvantage, to which I certainly do not subject myself wil­
lingly. But it seems to me more unpretending, to combine the
narrative and the disquisitions into one work, than to reserve the
latter for separate treatises, and to assume their results in the former
as established: at least such a mode of treating the subject accords
with the way in which this history arose and grew.
 ON THE SECULAR CYCLE.

IT is well known that, before the Julian reformation of the cal­

endar, the Roman was a lunar year, which was brought, or was
meant to be brought, into harmony with the solar by the insertion
of an intercalary month. The great Joseph Scaliger, with that
piercing eye which converts the declarations of such as know not
what they are saying into evidence of the truth, discovered the ori­
ginal system of this computation with irrefragable certainty. He
has shown that the principle was to intercalate a month, alternately
of 22 and 23 days, every other year during periods of 22 years, in
each of which periods such an intercalary month was inserted ten
times, the last bien\lium being passed over. As :five years made a
lustre, so five of these periods made a secle of 110 years717.
The notion that Italy was in a state of barbarism, until science
was first introduced there through the intercourse between Rome
and Greece, must give way, when we see that she had this easy
and regular computation of time, a computation so entirely forgotten
in .the very age of literary refinement, that C.esar found the year 67
days in advance of the true time, and was forced to borrow his
reformation of the calendar from foreign science. The utter igno­
rance of the Romans with regard to mathematics and astronomy,
the results of which, without the science, had been imparted to
them by the Etruscans, may probably have occasioned this confu­
sion early: but it was turned to account and aggravated by the
shameful dishonesty of the pontiffs, who, having assumed the
power of intercalating at discretion, favoured sometimes the con­
suls, sometimes the farmers of. the revenue, by lengthening the
year, or by shortening it oppressed them.
It is notorious, that, according to concurrent statements of the
most trustworthy ancient writers on Roman a~tiquities, the year of

717 De emendat. temporum, p. 180 and the following pages.

I.-BB
210 HISTORY OF ROME.
Romulus consisted of only ten months or 304 days. Among the
multitude of witnesses on this point, it is sufficient to refer to Cen­
sorinus and Macrobius, who state the number of days in these
months7 1 s. This year, which taken by itself agrees neither with
the moon nor with the sun, appeared so absurd to those who were
accustomed only to the views of the Greeks and of later times on
the subject, that Plutarch is disposed to doubt it could ever have
existed; nay, what is much more remarkable, Scaliger entirely
rejects it as a fiction, and following Licinius Macer and Fenestilla,
who however were likewise misled by their inability to understand
it, assumes as certain that the Roman year contained twelve months
from the beginning 10. But beside the above mentioned statements,­
which are equalled in precision by few remaining from the earliest
times, and therefore must by no means be rejected, if any ground
is to be left for history to build on,-we find unequivocal proofs that
this year was once actually in use, and more than one evident trace
of its application at a later period, when it was no longer known.
And it appears from the relation borne by the cycles of this year to
the lunar intercalated year explained by Scaliger, and .to its secular
period, that the former was on the one hand applicable along with
the other as a running correction, and on the other hand was pre­
ferable to it for scientific uses.
The first key to understanding this system occurs in a passage
of Censorinus ; where he says, that the lustre was the great year
of the ancient Romans*, that is to say, the cycle at the end of which
the beginning of the civil year would coincide with that of the solar.
It is true indeed at the same time that he confounds the lustre of
his own age, the Capitoline Pentaeterid, as some Greeks do the
Olympi~ds, with the ancient lustre, ~nd supposes it to have been
of the same duration : but though a philologer living in a late age
may take a wrong view as to the meaning of an ancient statement,
this does not lessen its value and use, when the misunderstanding
can be pointed out so distinctly as in the present case 20 •
Five Egyptian solar years of 365 days contain 1825 days; six
Romulian years of 304 only 1824. In five years accordingly the

718 De die natali 20. · Saturnal. 1. 12.

19 De emendat. temporum, p. 173.

* De die natali c. 18. .

20 Censorinus de die nat. c, 18. -If there be any who is not entirely
convinced by Scaliger's· arguments to prove this point, and to show that a
lustre contained five civil years, I refer him to some more specific observa­
tions which I shall make when I come to the institution of the censorship.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 211

Roman computation lost a day, when compared with the Egyptian

civil computation, which had no leap-year; but which in 1461 years
returned to its original point of starting with the loss of a year, as
the circumnavigator of the world returns with the loss of a <lay:
and when compared with the corrected Julian calendar the old
Roman lost nearly two days and a quarter. 'Now this indeed would
be so great a variation, that, unless there were other divisions of
time, evidently parts of the same system with the year of ten months,.
supplying the means of a regular intercalation, with that degree of
ease and harmony which is a self-evident proof, the cyclical use of
such a year would certainly be improbable. ·
These divisions are the longest and the shortest of the Etruscan
periods ; the secle, and the week of eight days. The former was
likewise the measure for the cycle of intercalated lunar years. Of
the latter we see traces among the Romans, in the practice of hold­
ing the market on every ninth day, the nundines: by the Tuscans,
or rather according to their system, this day was also called the
nones; and it is in connexion with this division of time, that the
ninth day before the ides permanently retained that name. Ilut the
Roman nundines stood in no relation to the body of their year; and
the nones were nothing more than a certain day in the month:
whereas among the Etruscans they served to mark the weekly pe­
riods; and every ninth day was the day of business, on which their
kings gave audience and administered justice' 21 • The year of ten
months containing· 304 days was exactly divisible into eight day
weeks, making 38 of them : accordingly there were 38 ancient
nones in it; and this is the very number of the dies Jasti retained
even in the Julian calendar 22 • So that the old number was pre­
served, according to the characteristic Roman way of proceeding:
but, since it was utterly insufficient for the business of the forum, a
far greater number of other days was added to it under different
names. Now as the weeks began every year on the same day of
the month, the number of days in the intercalary months, if there
were any, must likewise have been divisible by eight: or that order
would have been disturbed. But if an intercalary month of three
Tuscan weeks, or 24 days 23 , was inserted twice in the course of
721 Macrobius Saturnalia, 1. 15.
22 This number Manutius arrived at by merely counting them up, with­
out inquiring into the reason of it: de <lier. ratione in Gothofredus auctt. p.
1382. a.
23 I conceive my'!;elf the better justified in assuming the intercalary
month, the Mercedonius, to have been shorter than the rpst, since that of the
lunar year likewise contained only 22 or 23 days.
212 HISTORY OF ROME.

the secle or cyclical period of 110 years or 22 lustres, say in the

eleventh and the twenty-second lustre, the result at the end of. that
period gives a surprisingly close approximation to the true time,
and a correction for the cycles of the lunar year. For the five
periods which form the secle have been computed by Scaliger, who
sought no higher degree of exactness than that of the Julian calen­
dar, to contain 40,177 days: whereas the sum of the days in the
cyclical years, after the intercalation just mentioned, is 40,176.
This cycle then is more exact than the Julian computation, in
which the tropical year is taken at 365 days, 6 hours: for it
makes that year equal to 365d 5h 40' 22", which is 8' 23" too lit­
tle; while the Julian year is too long by 11' 15". We cannot
indeed assume that the calculation which determined this period,
descended to seconds ; and we must also observe that no people
has undertaken, nor is it practicable, to adapt the civil year to the
astronomical with such precision, that the theory of the men of
ticience touching the length of the latter can be exactly made out
from a cyclical period however long: It cannot be positively
<lenied, that the space of 15h 22' 10", by which the cyclical period
of 110 years is too short,and which in 172 years amounts to a <lay,
was made up by ulterior intercalations: but since the application
of the numerical rules, which up to this point" give us a complete
system, will not carry us any further, this renders it most pro­
bable that the Etruscans had fixed the tropical year at precisely 365d
5h 40'.
Of this profound science indeed nothing is said by Censorinus or
any other Roman: and Ennius is reported by Censorinus7 24 to have
assigned 366 days to the solar year. But by this he either meant
nothing more than that a part of the 366th day is comprised in the
tropical year; or, without understanding what he was saying, he set
down what at all events he had only heard from others. In Rome
itself the ignorance of astronomy in his time was undoubtedly very
great : and if the science of former days was not already extinct,
as it was afterwards, among the Etruscan priests, all that remained
was an acquaintance with its results: just as the Bramins mechan­
ically make use of formules, the scientific <leduction of which
they do not know and would not be able to comprehend. ·
Now from its scientific exactness it follows that this year was
by no means an empty form, but might be practically useful along
with the civil year, after the latter had been accurately regulated.

724 c. 19.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 213

For it is clear that in the last period of the secle, instead of an

intercalary month of 23 days, which the regular order required, it
became necessary to intercalate one of only 22 days, for preserving
the harmony between the two systems. This correction was easy,
provided a true account of time was kept from the beginning to the
end of the secle : and to guard against the confusion threatened by
the irregularity in the commencement of the years in the Fasti, the
practice of driving in the nail was resorted to, which at Rome was
·done in the Capitoline temple : to this usage, as has been observed
above, the Romans, after the dedication of that temple, were in­
ilebted for a true record of time. The meaning of this solemnity,
which was deemed ludicrous by the ignorance of later generations,
and which probably ceased ~s soon as it became customary for the
new consuls to be elected without any interreign, before the year
of their predecessors expired, had been already forgotten about the
middle of the sixth century. This led Cincius to relate that he had
found similar nails at Vulcinii in the temple of Nortia; he supposed
they were scores of the years made at a time when writing was
rare 25• The object was, to determine how many lustres liad
elapsed since the beginning of the secle : the close of a lustre, lus­
trum conditum, was doubtless noted in a similar manner.
The whole of the Eastern world followed the moon in its calen­
dar: the purely scientific division of a vast portion of time is pecu­
liar to the \Vest; being the fruit of observations made during many
centuries in the primitive ages of the Western world. This West­
ern world was connected with that primeval and extinct world,
which we call the New. The ancient Aztecans, whose calendar
was the most perfect any where used for civil purposes before the
Gregorian, had a great year consisting of 104 solar years 26 • Their
mode of dividing ii accorded with their system of numeration, in
which twenty-five was the base. ·During this period they too ,in­
troduced two intercalations, making up 25 days between them: and
when we read of the Mexican festivals of the New Fire at the be­
ginning of a new secul~r period, it is impossible not to be reminded
of the Roman, or, properly speaking, the Eti;uscan secular festi­
vals; more especially as at Rome a new fire was kindled in the
temple of Vesta on every first of March. This is a point certainly

725 Livy vn. 3.

2G There is an excellent treatise on the Mexican chronology by D. An­
tonio Leon y Gruna, entitled Saggio dell' .llstronomia Cronologia e J.Iitologia
degli anticlii Messicani, Roma 1804 (a translation from the Spanish) for the
knowledge of which I am indebted to the kindness of Professor ldeler.
214 HISTORY OF ROME.

on which every one must judge for himself: only let not this ex­
planation of the cyclical year be called a mere groundless hypothe­
sis, because its contents cannot be quoted from ancient writers word
for word. It results so essentially from this measure of time, with
such absolute arithmetical precision, and is in such exact harmony
with another system which is known to have existed, that it can
no more be owing to a sport of chance, than could mathematical
diagrams in the sand. And this is still more <leciaive than the con­
sideration, that our sole alternative is, between supposing the ear­
liest Romans not only so ignorant but so senseless as to use a cal­
endar dictated by no analogy in nature or science, and supposing
them to have used one which had been calculated by some learned
people. To assume with Macrobius, who takes no account of the
cycle, that, when the seasons did not agree with their months, they
let a certain time pass which had no name at all, is, from ignorance
of the modes of thinking prevalent even among the rudest tribes,
to degrade the Romans in barbarism below the lroquese. ·we are
far from meaning to class Romulus among astronomers, which Sca­
liger deprecates : but the name of the Romulian year need not and
indeed is not inten_ded to signify any thing but the original cyclical
one.
The Roman archeologers however were assuredly mistaken in
two of their suppositions ; that the calendar of ten months was
originally the only one in use, and that it was afterward given up
entirely. The former is improbable; for that calendar bears so
close a relation to the cycle of the lunar year,.that it can scarcely
be doubted they were formed at the same time : moreover the
earliest calendar for popular use would necessarily observe the
changes of the moon: and such a one, which adapted itself to the
seasons like the Fussli year in India, must always have been re­
quisite. The second supposition is erroneous: on the contrary the
year of ten months was undoubtedly still in use long after the time
of the kings; and it continued t') be applied in certain usages, the
origin of which was lost sight of in after times.
The Etruscans used to follow the honest rule of only making
peace under the form of a truce for a definite number of years.
The Roman treaties with. Veii, Tarquinii, Crere, Capenre, and
Vulsinii, are spoken of, almost without exception, as truces, with
a specification of the stipulated term. Now the Etruscans are not
charged with having broken any of these treaties; though hostilities
almost always recommence before the years of the truce have ex­
pired according to the Fasti. One instance, among several which
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 215

are quite unequivocal, and which will be pointed out in the course
of the history, is furnished by the peace with Veii in the year 280.
This was concluded for forty years. In 316 Fidenrn revolted, and
joined Veii*: which implies that the latter was already at war with
· Rome. That revolt excited great indignation among the Romans ;
yet they do not accuse the Veientines of having broken their oaths.
A still clearer instance is afforded by Livy's saying in the year 347,
when according to the Fasti eighteen years had elapsed of the
twenty-three years truce made in 329, that it had expired7 2 7. These
facts can only be explained by supposing the years were those of ten
months: for 40 of these are equal to 33! ordinary ones, 20 to 16i:
so that the former truce had corrie to an encl in the year 314; the
l_atter in the year 346.
The Latin tribes and the Hernicans employed very singular
methods of computing time; the system of which may perhaps be
divined by some one else from what Censorinus says concerning
the calendars of Alba, Lavinium, Tusculum, Aricia, and Ferentinum.
Their months are said to have varied from 39 days to 1628 • The
calendar of the Ausonian tribes, whatever its principles may have
been, was certainly quite different from the Roman civil one.
Hence Rome concluded.truces with them likewise, that is, with
the Volscians and JEquians, according to cyclical years: thus the
truce ratified in 323 for eight years, or 6t civil years, ended in 330:
nor are the Volscians charged with perjury in consequence of their
renewing hostilities the next year. The same practice prevailed
between the Romans and the Faliscans.
It was unquestionably in the spirit of the Etruscans and Italicans,
to make use of an unvarying calendar in cases where even an in­
voluntary transgression threatened to draw down punishm'ent from
the gods : and if we suppose that disorder had .already crept into
the Roman intercalations, this motive must have had double weight.
The. year of ten months was the term for mourning; for paying
portions left by will; for credit on the sale of yearly profits; most
probably for all loans; and it was the measure for the most ancient
rate of interest.
Scaliger, who stopped only one step short of the point at which
he would have discerned the nature of these chronological systems,

* Livy IV. 17. Fidenre-ad Veientes defccere.

727 Livy Iv. 58.

28 Censorinus c. 20. 22. I have no doubt, their real nature was of preJ
cisely the same kind as the Roman year; only it was disguised by a number
of artifices.
216 HISTORY OF ROME.

and who perhaps would not have suffered himself to be repelled by

their seemingly strange character, had he possessed a better account
of the Aztecan calendar; he before whose eyes every scientific peo­
ple of the earth shed light upon the rest; Scaliger himself remarks,.
how singular it is, that the Saturnalia and Matronalia, those beau­
tiful festivals of ancient household feelings, so inseparably con·
nected by their spirit, should have been celebrated, the former ai
the end of December, the latter at the beginning of March.
Of the chronological views which led Ennius to reckon about
seven hundred years between the building of Rome and his own
time, I have already suggested what I now regard as the more pro­
bable explanation: yet we might also suppose them to be cyclical
years of ten months ; for seven, hundred of these make about 583
civil years ; and it was in 582 that the old man wrote the last book
of his Annals.
Ten was the fundamental number of Etruria, being that of the­
secles assigned to the nation: that of Rome was twelve. And the
same proportion which exists in time between the cyclical and the
lunar year holds in the measurement of space between the Tuscan
vorsus and Roman actus. It even seems as if the Romans put to
death twelve Etruscan prisoners for every; ten of their countrymen
who had been sacrificed by the Tarquinians7 2 s.
Now as every statement of a day prior to the Gregorian reforma·
tion of the calendar must be referred, according to the true compu­
tation, to a different day from the one mentioned ; so would it be
with the number of years said to have elapsed, if a state were to
adopt a new system of years. The Roman antiquarians assumed,
that the years of the city in the earliest tables consisted of only ten
months: and most of them ascribed to Numa what they considered
as the introduction of a better calendar. For this reason Cincius
seems to have reduced the number of the ancient years which he
found in the table of the pontiffs, to an equivalent number of com­
mon years ; and according to the above mentioned assumption this
was certainly necessary, for determining the epoch of the founcla­
tion of Rome with reference to a clifferent era. The reigns of Numa
and Romulus incleed would only give a clifference of 13 years. But
Junius Gracchanus, an eminent investigator of ancient customs,
maintained that the old calendar continued in use until the time of

729 That is,-if, in Livy vu. 19, we may read cccLxvm, instead of
cccLYllI, or of cccnvm, as it is in the old editions,-368 men for 307.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 217

Tarquinius, that is, Priscus7 30• Now the pontiffs reckoned 132
years before his reign 31 : if Cincius took these to be cyclical years,
he got exactly a sede for the first four kings; and if he subtracted
the difference, 22 years, from the era of Polybius, the result for the
building of the city wonld be the very date 01. 12. 4.

730 Censorinus 20. 31 See p. 192.

I.-CC
THE BEGINNING OF ROl\iE AND ITS EAR­

LIEST TRIBES.

'VHEN the existence of an unknown southern continent was a

matter of general belief, when an outline of it used to 'be drawn on
maps, and it was deemed presumptuous incredulity to reject it as a
fiction, an essential service was then done to knowledge by the
voyagers who sailed across that line, and showed that; though cer­
tain points and coasts which had been included in it really existed,
they did not confer any reality on the imaginary continent. It was
a further step, to give a comprehensive proof of its non-existence.
Ilut the demands of geography could only be satisfied by an exa­
mination of the several islands which exist in the place attributed
to the supposed continent : and though the navigator was kept off
and prevented from landing on them by reefs and breakers, though
mists obscured his view of them, still what he perceived was no
longer merely negative gain: and many inferences were to be
drawn from our knowledge of such countries, as we had good
grounds for deeming of the same or of a similar kind in their phy­
sical nature and their population with the regions which could not
be immediately explored.
I am not inquiring who was the builder, or the lawgiver of Rome:
but with regard to the questions, what Rome was, before her his­
tory begins, and how she grew out of her cradle, some information
may be gleaned from traditions and from her institutions. That
which by long meditation on this subject has to me become clear
and certain, I am now about to communicate; not in the form of
au endless investigation of every minute circumstance that I build
my conclusions on, but acknowledging the rule of asserting nothing
however slight with any other than the precise shade of conviction
which it has in my own mind, and allowing myself to exercise that
freedom of judgment without which such a task becomes irksome.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 219

That Roma· is not a Latin name, was assumed to be self-evi­

dent739: and there. can be no doubt that the city had another, of an
Italian form, which was used in the sacred books, like the myste-·
rious name of the Tiber. The name Roma, which has a Greek
look like that of the neighbouring town of Pyrgi, belonged to the
city at the time when; like all the towns round about, it was Pelas­
gian; to the little Roma of the Sicelians or Tyrrhenians, on the
Palatine hill. A remembrance of that time is preserved in the state­
ment of Antioch us, that Sicelus came from Roma; and also in the
Cuman chronicle*: and if there were any Greek writers who called
Rome a Tyrrhenian city33 , I have already me.ntioned my belief,
that, at least in several of them and originally, this unlucky am­
biguous name did not mean the Etruscans, but the ancient Tyrrhe­
nians. Whether Roma fell before the Cascans, when they over·
powered the Sicelians, is doubtful: but it is most probable that ehe
belonged at one time to the number of the thirty Latin towns, which,
while they retained their freedom, acknowledged the supremacy of
Alba.
All the legends agree that the. Palatine was the original site of
Rom'e: and judging from the mode of fortification in general ase
among the people of the country, we must needs suppose that it
covered the whole hill, the sides of which the ,inhabitants cut ab­
ruptly away as well as they could. No town in such very remote
ages would· have been so laid out that the line of its walls should
pass along the valley around the hill; and only in the• course of
time, here as at Athens, did the original city become the citadel.
What Tacitus speaks of as the pomcerium of Romulus 34 , is an en­
largement of the original compass; taking in a suburb, or borough,
round about the city,·scantily fortified with a mere wall and narrow
ditch, as the chronicles describe the Borghi round Florence: this
weak fortification is the one that Remus insults in the legend. The
word pomrerium itself seems properly to denote nothing more than
a suburb taken into the city and included within the n1nge of its
auspices. By the statement of Tacitus, that of Romulus ran from
the Forum Boarium-that is, from the neighbourhood of the Janus
which, according to a tradition one would gladly believe, w~s con­
sidered in the middle ages as the remains of the palace of Boethius,
the last of the Romans-through the valley of the Circus; then
732 Macrobius 111. 9. Romani ipsius urbis nomen· Latin um ignotum esse
voluerunt.
* See note 595. 33 Dionysius as referred to in note 597.
34 Annal. xu. 24.
220 HISTORY OF ROME. •

from the Septizonium to ;i.bout the beginning of the Via del Colos­
seo, or a little below the baths of Trajan7 35 ; from thence along the
top of the Velia to the chapel of the Lares; and finally by the Via
Sacra to the Forum: her~ was a swamp reaching to the Velabrum.
Another borough, which however was unconnected with the town
on the Palatine, and probably was of later origin, stood on the Ca­
rinre, near S. Pietro in Vincola: it bad an earth wall toward the
Subura, then the village of Sucusa3 a; and the gate at the foot of
the Viminal, spoken of in the legend of the Sabine war3 7, the Porta
Janualis, can have been no other than that which closed the bottom
of the ascent leading up to the Carime.
The remark made by Dionysius, that the Aborigines dwelt upon
the hills in a number of scattered villages, is confirmed by the state
of the country about the original town of Roma, whatever opinion
may be entertained as to the primitive inhabitants. One of these
places, as I have already observed, was probably called Remuria:
one on the other side of the river, somewhere near S. Onofrio, Va­
tica or Vati cum: for from a place so called must the ager Vaticanus
have received its name 88 : the tradition too which places another
village on the Janiculum, seems deserving of attention, however
little maybe due to its pretended names, .l.Enea or Antipolis*. These
villages must have been the first that disappeared before Rome.
The original territory of Rome, as it did not extend beyond the
Tiber toward Etruria, so it was con.fined on the other sides by.the
towns on the neighbouring hills 89 : in the direction of the sea alone
did it extend to any distance. So that there was no independent
settlement on the Aventine in those days: on the Cmlian however
was the town of which I shall speak further on. But of incom­
parably greater importance was the o~e on what in early times was

735 Co=only called the baths. of Titus. Blond us in 1440 found this dis­
trict still described in legal documents as the Curia Vetus, and so called by
the inhabitants. Roma Instaurata1 u. 32. This line however seems to make
much too great an inclination.
36 Varro de I. l.1v. 8.
37 Macrobius 1. 9. Cum hello Sabino Romani portam,· qum sub radicibus
collie Viminalis erat, claudere festinarent. This is the legend related above
p.175.
38 After the analogy of the ager .11/JJanus, Tusculiinus,La'Dicanus,and so on.
* Dionysius 1. 73. Pliny m. 9.
39 Festus v. Pectuscum palati. Earegio.urbis;quam Romulus observam
posuit, ea parte in qua plurimum erat agri Romani ad mare versus: cum Etrus­
corum agrum a Romano Tiberus discluderet, ceterw vicime civitates colles
aliquos habcrent oppositos.
 HISTORY OF ·ROME. . 221

called the Agonian hill, the town of which the Capitoline may be
considered as the ~itadel: for the. skirts of these two hills met in a
spot which afterward formed a part of the Forum Ulpium; while a
swamp and marsh, extending from the Velabrum across the Forum
as far as the Subura, separated this. town from Roma on the Pala­
tine. If we wish to know the name of this town, I think I may
assume without scruple, that it was Quirium; for that of its inhabi­
tants was Quirites740 • The derivation of Quirites from Cures does
but badly, that from quiris not at all: assuredly too in the earlier
legend Numa was described as a citizen of Quirium, not of Cures.
The later name of the hill, the Quirinal; is derived from that of the
town.
That this hill was inhabited by the Sabines, is as certain, as any
well established fact in the ages where we have contemporary his­
tory: nor is this certainty lessened by our finding the tradition
connected with. the war of Tatius and the heroic lay. That the
Sabines were ;m elementary part of the Roman people, appears
from most of the Roman religious ceremonies being Sabine, and
referred, some to Tatius 41 , some to Numa. The connexion too
between the Quirinal and Capitoline hills was preserved in undis­
puted recollection49 : the place where the house of Tatius had stood,
was shown in the Capitol, on the spot where the temple of l\fontea
was afterwards built43 • The Sabines, when they had driven the Cas­
cans and the U mbrians befor'e them, continued to push forward their
conquests down the Tiber : hence we find their towns Collatia and
Regillum in the midst of the Latin ones in this district44 : the Latin or
Siculian towns, amongst which they established themselves, it is

740 ·After the analogy of Samnium, Samnis. By the way, the town, a citi­
zen of which was called Interamnis, (Cicero pro Milon. c.17.)aname altered
by the critics into Interamnas contrary to the manuscripts, must have been
Interamnium: the other town was Interamna.
41 Varro de I. 1. iv. 10. p. 22. Dionysius u. 50.
42 TJ/rJo, (rf1w 1<1tTl_:t"1v) TO K<t7r1TaiA101 07r1p o; dp;t'ii' 1<1t'l'tO"_:tt, 111ti
'l'OY Kuplm1 o,:tBov. Dionysius u. 50. One might suppo~e that the first
Sabine settlement was on the Tarpeian rock; cum Sabini Capitolium atque
arcem implessent : Livy 1. 33. When the junction of the Quirinal with
Rome is ascribed to ~uma (Dionysius u .. 62.), this is in reference to the
Sabine character of that hill.
43 Plutarch Romul. c. 20.
44 Collatia, et quidquid circa Collatiam agri erat, Sabinis ademptum.
Livy 1. 38. But we must not overlook that Virgil mentions it among the
Latin towns: JEn. vi. 774. Rcgillum is spoken of as Sabine: Livy u. 16;
Dionysius v. 40.
 222 HISTORY OF ROME.

more than probable, were subject to them. Nor did the original town
of Homa escape this lot.; though she may perhaps have maintained
herself for a considerable time against the rival town which was
rising on the opposite side of the intervening marsh. Roma and
Quirium were two completety distinct towns; like the Greek and
Hispanian Emporire, which were separated as states, and by
walls*; like the Phenician Tripolis of the Sidonians, Tyrians, and
Aradianst; like the Oldtown and Newtown of Dantzic in the mid­
dle ages, and the three independent towns of Kcenigsberg, which,
while their walls met, made war with' one another; like Ghadames
in Northern Africa, where two hostile tribes dwell within the same
inclosure, separated from each other by a partition-wall:j:. Nor
have all traces of the steps by which the two towns were united
into one state, been effaced. A tradition was preserved, that each
had its king, and its senate of a hundred men' 45 , and that they met
together in the Comitium, which received its name from thence,
between the Palatine and the Capitoline hills 46 • Let me not be
charged then with offering a vapid interpretation of the poetical
story, such as I should reject with disgust, if I interpret the rape
of the Sabines and the war which broke' out in consequence, as
representing that at one time there was no right of intermarriage
between the two cities, and how the one which had before been in
subjection, raised itself by arms to an ~quality of civil rights, and
even to a preponderance•. The preservation of Romulus and Re­
mus is a fable, such as may pass from the heroic poetry of one
people into that qf another, or may arise in several places, as it
was told of Cyrus in the East, and of Habis in the West: but the
rape of the S~bines relates to traditions of quite another kind.
When the two cities had been united on terms of equality.' they

* Livy xxxzv. 9. t Strabo xvi. p. 754. d.

t Lyon's Travels in Northern Africa. p. 162.
745 'E/6ou'/o.fuwro oi {6<1.11'1Mic OUK. euBrlc ;, "~"'!' p.1<r' .i.1111il11c.1, rl.>.>.' '""'·
µ1TtL 'Tl.t!Y i1'c:ttr0v, t!'Tc:t oVTQl' ei~ 'T«utrOv d. '71'a.Vrr«.r cruvM')'ov.
1
'1'tpoc 1rp6rrtpo1 ;Jlr.t.
Plutarch Romul. c. 20. '
46 I am aware the word comire was considered as only containing
· a record of the meeting in which the two kings concluded the treaty (Plu­
tarch Romul. c. 19.); and hence their statues were erected in the Comitium,
in the Via Sacra; that is, in the part of it which led from the side of the
Capitol to the gate of the Palatium. Ilut the Comitium was afterward the
place where the. patricians assembled; and as the senate of the two cities
met there 1 110 assuredly in case of general deliberations did the whole pody
of the citizens, the ancestors of the patricians.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 223
built the double J anus74 7 on the road leading from the Quirinal to
the Palatium, with a door facing each of the cities, as the £rate of
the double barrier which separated their liberties: it was open in
time of war, that succour might pass from one to the other; and
shut during peace; whether for the purpose of preventing an unre­
stricted intercourse, out of which quarrels might arise, or as a sym­
bol of their being distinct though united. The boundary between
the two towns was probably marked by the Via Sacra; which came
down from the top of the Velia, between the Quirinal and the Pala­
tine properly so called, and then making a bend ran between the
latter and the Capitoline, as far as the temple of Vesta, whence it
turned right across the Comitium toward the gate of the Palatine:
it was evidently destined for common religious processions.
Among the vestiges of the joint kingdom was the double throne,
which Romulus retained after the death of Remus 49 : we may also
discern a symbol of the double state, as the ancients have done be­
fore us 49 , in the head of Janus which from the earliest times was
stamped on the Roman as: the ship on the reverse side aliudes to
the maritime sway of the Tyrrhenians.
A double people the Romans certainly continued to be until low
down in the historical age: it was natural that this should be indi­
cated symbolically on many occasions. And this is th~ true mean­
ing of the story of the twin brothers: which, if it was iirst occa­
sioned by the union of Roma with Remuria, was kept up by that
of the Romans with the Quirites ; and gained the most vivid reality
from the relation between the patricians and the plebeians. Romus
and Romulus are only different forms of the same name 50 ; the
Greeks, on hearing a rumour of the legend about the twins, chose
the former instead ot the less sonorous name of Remus.
The unio'u became firmer'; whether they were alarmed by the
progressive approach of the Tuscan conquests, or by the power of
Alba. In course of time, when the feeling that the citizens of the
two towns were one people had been fostered by intermarriages
and a common religious worship, they came to an agreement to
have but one senate, one popular assembly, and one king, who.was

747 The Janus Quirini. The other Januses in the Via Sacra were of the
same kind. 48 See above p. 172, n. 6.26.
49 Servius on lEn. 1. 291. Alii dicunt Tatium et Romulum facto fredere
Jani templum redificasse, unde et Janus ipse duas facies habet, quasi ut osten­
dat duorum regum coitionem.
50 See note 219.
224 HISTORY OF ROME.
to be chosen alternately by the one people out of the other7 51 • If
we might suppose that in touches of this kind the poetical story
aimed to present us with historical traditions, the establishment of
this legitimate order was preceded by a usurpation on the part of
the Romans, whose king prevented the election of a successor to
his Quirite colleague. From this time forward at the least the two
nations, having now become one, were styled on all solemn occa­
sions populus Romanus et Quirites; or properly, after the old
Roman usage of combining such names by mere juxtaposition,
populus Romanus Quirites 52 : which in later times was distorted
into populus Romanus Quiritium. For although subsequently the
names Quirites and plebeians were synonymous, this ought not to
shake the credit of the tradition, that the former were properly the
Sabine subjects of Tatius. It is easy to understand how, after all
distinction between the Romans and the ancient Quirites had ceased,
the name was transferred to the plebeians, who were now placed
in similar circumstances with the latter. By this union Romulus
was converted into Quirinus : and Quirium probably became that
mysterious Latin name of Rome, which it was forbidden to utter.
Wherever mention is made of tribes in ancient history, before
the time when an irresistible change in the condition of society led
to democratical institutions, if there be any difference in theirrights
and any thing can be discerned of their nature, it is manifest that they
a~e either distinct castes or of different origin i and even the dis­
tinction of castes, where it can be accounted for, always rose from
immigration or from conquest, even in Egypt and India. This fate
therefore must have been experienced by Attica e".en before the
Ionian immigration ; if the opinion that there were at one time
three tribes there, formed by the nobles, the peasants, and the
craftsmen 58 , be any thing more than a dream. For the four Ionic

751 It was because the patres were conceived in later times to be in all
cases the same as the senators, that the story of Numa's election assumed its
present form.
52 This is established by the learned Bri~sonius : de Form. 1. p. 61: he
only goes too far in imputing the later corruption, which Li\l"y found already
in use, to the transcribers, and in wishing to rid Roman writers of it. This
exaggeration was the cause which prevented even that excellent critic I. F.
Gronovius from perceiving the truth of the remark: Obss. 1v. 14. It is like
lis mndicial and lis vindieiarum.
53 Julius Pollux VIII. 111. 'Eu,,.11.-rplJ'ru, °)'t1JOµopo1, Jnµ1oup}'ol. But the
light which Hermann has thrown on this suhject, in his preface to the Ion p.
xx1, makPs me consider it almost certain that the statement is not authentic.
Assuredly thf'y would not have derived their name's simply from their callings:
 HISTORY OF ROME. 225
tribes there is historical evidence.; but the explanation which con­
verts them into castes rests only on a very dubious interpretation of
their names, assuming that they express conditions and callings
more or less clearly, and answer to the four tribes of Dgiamschid,
the priests, the warriors, the husbandmen, and the shepherds. At
the same time it must not be overlooked that in rank, as to which
the order of the names is unquestionably decisive, the Hopletes are
the last7 54 : so that the warriors would stand below the labouring
classes.
As to the practice of dividing a people into tribes acco~ding to
the different nations or places it came from, it is sufficient to adduce
two instances from the earlier ages of Greece. The Cyrenians were
distributed by Demonax into three tribes : one contained the The­
rreans and their subject peasantry : the second the Cretans and
Peloponnesians ; the third all the other islanders 55 • Another in­
stance is furnished by Thurium : first in the relation between the
old Sybarites and the new citizens,-although that belong;; also to
another head,-and next in the division of the latter, when they
had got rid of the others, into ten tribes, according to their descent
from the Peloponnesus, from Athens and the Ionian towns, or from
other states between the Isthmus and Thermopylre56• Still nearer
home we find a similar instance at Mantua: where the power of the
Tuscan blood among the three tribes can only be explained to mean,
that one of them, the ruling one, consisted of Tuscans; the others
of foreigners; Ligurians or Umbrians 57.

pr~bably however it may be the fact, that at Athens also, before the time of
the lonians, there were three tribes, the names of which are unknown.
754 Not only according to Herodotus v. GG, but also according to the Cy­
zicene inscription cited by Wesseling in his note.-Hermann's remarks have
completely freed me from the yoke of an opinion to which I had long been
accustomed.
55 Herodotus 1v. 161. In this division it deserves to be noticed, that,
although at Thera there was a narrow aristocracy, and only a very limited
number of houses were eligible to magistracies, in this colony the Therreans
and their subjects were on a level.
56 Diodorus xn. 11.
57 In a note on lEn. x. 201, and foll.
-sed non genus omnibus unum.
Gens illi triplex, populi sub gente quaterni :
lpsa caput populis, Tusco de sanguine vires:
Servius, wretchedly as he has been mutilated in the later hooks, has yet pre­
served a scholium of some value : quia Mantua tres habuit populi tribus, qure
in quaternas curias dividehantur. Gens is used for tribus, as the ten tribes of
the Persians are called "'"" in Herodotus, 1. 1~.5, and the VJpihp~ of the Achre-
1.-DD
226 lllSTORY OF IWME.
Thus the citizens of the two towns, when their confederacy was
converted into a union, became the members of two tribes, the Ram­
nes and Tities, whose names are deduced with one consent from
their royal founders. But along with them we find a third tribe,
the Luceres: a name the explanation of which was a matter of much
controversy among the Roman antiquai-ians. Most of them7s• de­
rived it from Lucumo, a pretended Etruscan ally of Romulus, who
is said to have fallen in the Sabine war 59 ; some from Lucerus a
king of Ardea60 ; in other words the citizens of this tribe were held
by the former to be Etruscans, by the latter to be Tyrrhenians.
A perfectly natural explanation is supplied by another form of
the name, Luccrtes 61, which manifestly comes, like Tiburtes, from
tlrnt of a place, Lucer or Lucerum. These likewise were the citi­
zens of a separate town, who were incorporated and formed a new
tribe: the site of their town must be looked for on the Crelian.
This hill is said to have formed part of the city even in the time of
Romulus 62 : Tullus Hostilius however is considered as properly the
founder of the settlement upon it, in consequence of his bringing
the Albans thither : this then was the abode of the Alban houses
which he raised into Roman ones, as that of the Sabines was on the
Quirinal. A branch of the Romans is referred to Tullus, in the
same manner as the two primary tribes are to Romulus and Numa,
and the plebs to Ancus: these four kings are spoken of as the au­
thors of the ancient laws, and only these, not Tarquinius 68 : assign­
ments of lands too are ascribed to them all four, which is a token
that they were regarded as the .founders, each of a distinct part of
the Roman nation. Now the only part left for Tullos are the Lu­
ceres; so that these must be the same with the citizens of his town

menids is included in the }EV•~ of the Pasargads. In the passage of Virgil

however the division according to descent appears to be mixed up with a local
one : the populi seem to be twelve demcs in the territory of Mantua. At
least the words may naturally mean, ;Mantua is the chief over twelve demes;
whereas they must be very artificially strained, if Virgil intended to say, she
is the chief of tlte curies contained in lter tribes. On Tusco de sanguine vires,
Servius says: quia robur omne de Lucumo;,,ibus (from the ruling Etruscans)
l1al,uit.
758 Even Cicero de Re p. u. 8.
59 Merely because he never appears afterward. The name of Lucomedi
(see Festus) for the Luceres must have been confined to poets.
60 Festus v. Lucerenses. 61 The same in the same place.
62 Dionysius u. 50. 'f·,..,'p,,.µrJM~ To TictA.iTm (11.a:rl;t1.1>1) ""'' TO
Kctfa1or .'&po,.
63 Numa religionibus et di vino jure populum devinxit, repertaquc quw­
dam a Tullo et Anco. Tacitus Annal. Ill. 2;), 1.. :.~·
 HISTORY OF ROME. 227

on the Crelian, which I shall henceforward call Lucerum without

further preface. To the very same spot are we· led by the story
deriving their name from Lucumo in the time of Romulus: for this
Lucumo is no other than the Tuscan captain -Crelcs Vibenna, who
is said to have settled on this hill with his band of followers, and
from whom its name was <le<luced. With regard to the king by
whom he was received, there were very different statements: some
of them went back to the time Qf Romulus 664 ; because the Crelian
was already belonging to Rome before the union with the Sabines.
The powerful Etruscan was conceived to be a Lucumo ; and his
appearing in the two forms of Lucumo and of Crelius is owing to
those who held the former to be a proper name.
As Numa, the father of the Tities, was made to come from Cures,
so was Tullus Hostilius through his father 65 from Medullia, a Latin
town which had been conquered by the Romans. This implies
that. Lucerum was in a state of subjection, and was inhabited by a
Latin race, anterior io the Alban settlement: so likewise does the
account that the Crelian was subject to the Roman kings in the
days of Tatius.
As the citizens of each of these places formed a separate tribe,
so did the territory belonging to each form a region in the total
domain 66 • This is erroneously represented as a division of the
ager. There is less incorrectness in the view which ascribes the
I

764 Dionysius n. 36. sq>' £vo, ~)'2µovo' ;,. Tvppn1lt1., f>,BorTo,,,; Kt1.fa10,
~voµ.e1. riv, 'l"Wl' >.O~~v 'TlC" iv '!',.. x.cc9IJ'pUv9n Kr1.f>...1oc-x~;...eirrtt1.
65 Dionysius m. 1. His voluntary removal is a recent alteration, for
the sake of preserving an imaginary decorum: in the old legend he must have
been among the captive's who were carried away to Rome. It is by no means
necessary to regard the derivation of the Ilostilii from Medullia as a fiction:
the surname Mcdullinus in the Fasti shows that a family of the Furii were of
the same origin; as does that of Camerinus that a branch of the Sulpicii came
from Cameria: both towns according to the legend were reduced and incor­
porated by Romulus. A considerable number of Roman surnames are with­
out doubt derived from the names of towns, every recollection of which has
been erased from history: thus there must have been such towns as Viscellia
and Malugo. The houses which bore these surnames belonged probably to
the Luceres: as all those which are called Alban houses admitted by Tullus,
and accordingly even the Julii, did necessarily. Among these Albans there
were Cloelii and Servilii: the Fa.sti exhibit the names Cloe Iius Siculus and
Servilius Priscus, both which surnames a.re evidence of Latin blood. Others
attest that some of the ancient houses were sprung from different nations;
such as Aquillius Tuscus, Sicinius Sabinus, Cominius Auruncus: the Aurun­
cians were the nation to which the Cascans belonged. Al?ove pp. 5:3. G3.·
6G Varro de L. L. JV. !l. p. 17. Ager Romanus primum divisus in partt•s
trPs: a quo trihus appellatre, Ra.mnium, 'J'itiPnsium, Lncnum.
228 HISTORY OF ROME.
assignment of landed property to the founders of the three tribes,
the first three kings: for according to the principles of the Roman
constitution all such property emanated from the republic: those
who became citizens delivered up theirs to the state, and received
it back from the hands of the same. The ignorance of later ages
regarded this as a partition of the domain.
In every nation of antiquity there was a peculiar immemorial
mode of division into a stated number of tribes. If the citizens of
a state, whether the whole body of them, or a portion of that body,
enjoyed an equality of civil rights, and at the same time did not
live united together in a central capital, but scattered about in ham­
lets, these were subjected. to the same principle of arrangement.
The Dorians in Rhodes dwelt according to their tribes in its three
cities7 67: the same division by three lies at the bottom of that of
the Latin towns, and of the plebeian tribes, as well as of the
curies: the two former like the latter were subdivisions of tribes;
and the former like the latter contained only a decury a piece, of
which we find traces in the Latin tradition representing the found­
ing of Lavinium as its restoration:!<. Thus the senate of a Latin
town consisted of ten decuries : an institution which was retained
in the Latin colonies, and preserved or introduced by the Julian
law in all the municipal towns created by it, where the senate con­
sisted of the stated number of a hundred decurions. The Roman
senate when completed was formed by the united senates of the
three towns, each of which sent a hundred senators.
These tribes were not castes: yet if a new state arose, it was not
allowable for it to deviate from the peculiar fundamental institution
of the nation it belonged to. When Demonax settled the constitu­
tion of .Cyrene, the phyles he established were different from the
original Dorian three, because circumstances made such a differ­
ence necessary: but inasmuch as Cyrene was substantially a Dorian
city, although some Ionian islanders were incorporated, the tripar­
tite division was kept. The Sabines had very probably a different
division from the Latins: but according to that division Quirium
belonged in the same manner as ·Roma to a tribe of itl? nation.
When Roma and Quirium both separated themselves from their
respective nations and established ~ independent state, the Latin
principle became the prevalent one in this state; and they took

767 llliad B. 6Li8. Tpi;tB~ J'j i"ij9H 1'«T«<j>ull.ct.J'o~. The Dorians every­
where appear as "P'.:t"'""·
. * See above p. 153.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 229

three for the number of their tribes; because the power of Roma
preponderated. ~Ience the account in the old narrative, that the
thirty curies were established immediately after the union of the
two states, is not incorrectly conceived: only it must not be re­
ferred solely to the Romans on the Palatine and to the Sabines.
The third tribe was formed by the Luceres, although they were
under the supremacy of Kome, and their senate was not incorpo­
rated till afterward: nor would their burghers be admitted to the
comitium. Thus the Irish parliament till 1782 was dependent on
what had long before become the united parliament of Great Bri­
tain.
The gradual extension of the rights of citizenship to the second
and the third tribe is scarcely perceptible in the ·historians that re­
main, except in the accounts how the number of the senators was
augmented: in these it is appareut, notwithstanding the discrep­
ancies in the details. All agree in making the senate consist at first
of a hundred: Livy is the only one who says nothing of its en­
largement after the peace with the Sabines : the common tradition,
in accordance with a correct view of the subject, relates that it was
ooubled. A few writers stated that the number was only raised to
a hundred and fifty7 68 : these conceived that all the three tribes were
represented, by fifty a piece, as in the 'council of Five-hundred at
Athens; and that before the federation with the Sabines the Ramnes
and Luceres were so by the original hundred. The connexion be­
tween this account and the one that Tarquinius Priscus doubled the
number of senators6 9, I shall explain in the proper place: it is suf­
ficient for the present to acknowledge that when Dionysius states,
the senate was augmented by Tarquinius from two to three hun­
dred, this is manifestly the correct way of expressing the admission
of the third tribe: whereas on the contrary in the account of his
having filled up the number by adding two hundred7°, it is forgotten
that the elevation of the Sabines preceded that of the Luceres.
Each of these towns, even the dependent one of Lucerum, had
not only a senate of its own, but its peculiar civil and ecclesiastical
dignities: and these were preserved as· far as was possible, when

768 Dionysius n. 47. Plutarch Numa c. 2.

69 In the Section on the Six Equestrian Centuries. Those who wrote
that Tullus Hostilius increased the number of the knights by ten turms, or
by a third, and also that of the senate, regarded him a~ the founder of Luce­
rum; and forgot the distinction between the separate institutions of a singlr
city, and those of a tribe.
70 Zonaras VII. 8.
 230 UISTORY UF 1Wi\IE.

the two sovereign bodies of citizens were transformed into tribes.

Dionysius says, that Numa put a stop to dispute:;: among the pa­
tricians, without taking any of their rights from the original citizens,
the Albans of Romulus, by granting other honours to the new citi­
zens, the Sabine tribe77 1 • No new honours however were created
on the union of the two states ; but each preserved its own. The
Luceres on the contrary at the time of their union 'were only ad­
mitted to a share in a few: their offices continued to subsist among
them, not however as national, but as local offices, as was the case
subsequently in the municipal towns. Hence in most of the offices
under the republic we find the two tribes represented, seldom the
three. This relation, and the way in which the inferior houses
were kept in the back ground, appears most clearly in the colleges
of the priests.
Before the senate ~as thrown open to the third tribe, there were
only four Vestals : the same king who enlarged its civil rights,
added two to the number of the virgins, that each tribe might have
its ownn.
According to the same principle, as Livy had been informed,
there ought to have been one augur, or, if more, an equal number,
for each tribe7 3 : hence, as there were only four when the Ogulnian
law was passed, he conjectures that two places must have been
vacant from deaths. But that law can never have been enacted
with reference to such an accidental diminution of the number, or
have made it a ground for abridging the rights of the patricians: it is
clear that only the first two tribes had augurs, two a piece, and that
Tarquinius did not place the third on the same footing with them
in this case, as he did in that of the Vestals. Two out of these
four are said to have been instituted by Numa74.
The pontiffs likewise had continued to be four in number, that
.is, two a piece for the Ramnes and the Tities7 5 : and the preliminary

771 ToVc 'lrttrrp1x,fovc oUJ'Ev µiv dq>£A0µevor ;, oi x.'T lcra.vTEC 'T~V 71'6>..1'1
tupov-ro, -ro'i' J" E7l'ol1£0l' e-rip!t.C 'rlV"-' d.71'0.f'o!i, -r1µ«,, 071'<tUO't dl<t<p•poµivou,.
II. 62.
72 Festus v. Sex Vestre Sacerdotes: Dionysius u. 67. Plutarch (Numa
c. 10.) ascribes the last augmentation to Servius, but speaks of a previous
one, from two to four.
73 Livy x. 6.
74 Cicero de Rep. II 14. The account in the same w9rk n. 9, that Romu­
lus appointed three augurs, is founded on the supposition that each of the three
towns had its own.
. 75 According to Livy's expr!'ss testimony x. 6. Cicero indeed says, that
Nnrna instituted fiv!' pontiff~ (de Re p. 1i. H); but in ~o doing he n•ckons the
 IllSTOH,Y OF JWME. 231

ceremonies in an assembly of the populus were performed by only

two flamens, along with the pontiffs and augurs77 6 : although the
greater flamens were three in number; so that there were also one
for the third estate. The fecials, the judges of international law,
were twenty77; that is, one from every cury of the first two tribes:
thus also four of them used to be sent on embassies, two from each
tribe 7".
The same principle of placing the two tribes on an equality, and
keeping the third below them, is apparent in the fraternities. The
original Salian priests of Gradivus had their chapel and sanctuary
on the Palatine; for they belonged to the primitive Romans : the
Agonales, the priests of- Pavor an<l Pallor, had theirs on the Quiri­
nal ; consequently they were of Sabine origin7 9 • So confe~sedly
were the Sodales Titii : they probably answered to the Fratres
Arvales. Lastly even the Luperci had two colleges; the Fabii and
the Quinctilii. The former, who are sai<l to, have been the com­
rades of Remus, may be considered as the Sabine fraternity ; more
especially as the Fabian house seems to have belonged to the Sa­
bines"0 : the rivalry between the two tribes gleams through the
legend 81 • It may perhaps have been the wish to deal evenly with
both; that determined the number of the duumvirs who kept the
Sibylline books, and that of the duumviri Perduellionis: that of
the consuls however probably rested on different grounds : it is
more likely that the laws of Servius designed one of them to be a
plebeian.

chief pontiff, who was not one of the major pontiffs, along with them, Had
the number been five, the Ogulnian law would not have added fo1,1r, but five
plebeians; more especially as five was the plebeian number. Including the
chief pontiff they subsequently made nine, like the augurs; being the same
multiple of the number of the original tribes: hence Sylla augmented them
to five times three. The minor pontiffs, whose name, when its meaning was
forgotten, was transferred to the secretaries of the college, were most probably
those of Lucerum.
776 Dionysius x. 32. iepo<P«VT<»• 'I"'
71'«ponr»v, ""' oir»v•<T1<o:rr»v, &«l itp•­
11'Glr»• JiJolr.
77 Varro 3 de vita p. R. in Nonius de doctor. in:d. xu. 43. v. Fetiales.
fetiales viginti qui de !iis rebus cognoscerent, judicarent, et constituerent
(statuerunt).
78 Varro in the passage of Nonius last quoted: fetiales legatos res repe­
titum mittebant quatuor. By the way, in the same paragraph, where the
edition of Mercerus has magna licentia bella suscipiebant,and the interpolated
editions nulla licentia, the true reading is magna diligentia.
79 This was forgotten in the tradition which attributes the institution of
them to Tullus llostilius.
80 See note 810. 1'1 Ovid Fa~t. 11. 361, foll.
232 HISTORY OF ROM.i<.:.
Had the royal dignity been entrusted for life to two elective ma­
gistrates, it would have been ruinous to the peace of the state : the
survivor would have found it. easy to prevent the election of a suc­
cessor to his colleague, as Romulus is related to have done. That
instead of choosing two kings, the practice was adopted of electing
one alternately from tlie Romans and from the Quirites, is visible in
the instances of Tullus and Ancus, the former of whom is con•
nected with the Romans through Hostus, the latter through Numa
with the Quirites. Numa belongs to the earlier order of things,
when the king was elected by one tribe out of the other.
The first two tribes having these decided privileges, as the whole
body of the original citizens were called the patrician houses7 89, the
third tribe properly bears the name of the minor houses. The votes
of the senators of this class were taken after those of the major
houses 88 : in like manner the curies of the Luceres were assuredly
not called up during a long period till after the others. Their dis­
tinguishing epithet answers to the difference in civil rights; and
this was so trifling between the first two tribes, that the error of
Dionysius in applying the name of minor houses to the second,
falls to the ground of itself, as soon as it is pointed out.
A certain precedency indeed the.first tribe must have maintained;
and this is agreeable to the general course of h.istory : thus at Co­
logne the. fifteen oldest houses always ranked above the rest. The
title of the decem prirni, whom we hear of in the Latin senate even
before their great war with the Romans*, as we do afterward in all
the colonies and municipal towns, denotes, according to the simplest
explanation, the body formed by the ten who were the first in their
respective decuri.es. In the Roman senate likewise there were ten
such chiefs84 ; and these undoubtedly .were the same who formed
the decemvirate of the interrexes, one from each decury. Mention
is also made of the judicature in capital causes having once been

782 Gentes patricire. See note 821. ·

83 Cicero de Re p. 11. 20. Hence Dionysius, II. ()2, from confounding
the Tities with them, says, that the senators of Alban extraction created by
Romulus, the Ramnes, laid claim l''""~o~ 11."px,m ..
* Livy vm. 3. ·
84 Valerius Maximus 1. 1, 1. Ut decem principum filii singulis Etrurim
populis traderentur. The same ten were also sent by the Romans on embas­
sies; even to the plebeians during the secession: oi ii1-orl1-uvo1 'TOU trvveJplov X<tl
'11'flll'l'GI .'T<LC J'V,;µ<LC 47TO't<t.l10f.UVOI 'l"l»r ti.'>..1HllV nµ•lC tuµlv;' the ten embassa­
dors: Dionysius v1. 34.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 233

confined to the purest tribe'85 : and whatever may have been the ex­
act state of the case as to this obscure point-for that the Ti ties,
even supposing they had no share in the capital jurisdiction over
the minor houses, must have exercised one over their own members,
is indisputable; and besides, as I have already noticed, two was the
number of the judges for capital causes-at all events the account
implies a tradition of the precedency of the lofty Ramnes" 6 •
. ,

785 """' r6p.1p."'- li11.dfT'<ifp1e1, ?r•pl B"'v"'"°" ul qiur'iit P."'"'-'/>iporT•t i11. 'Tlit
11.d6"-P1JD'T"-'1'Ht <1>u11.iit i,,.l 'TOV pu?r"'-P,.'<"'-T•V o;tMr. Dionysius 1x. 44.
86 Celsi Ramnes. Welcome, proud cousins (stolze Vettern), was the ad­
dress with which the members of a house greeted each other in Ditmarsh;
and in the Danish ballads proud (stolt) is perpetually used as an honourable
epithet for a damsel.

I.-EE

"'

THE P ATRfCIAN HOUSES .AND THE CU­

RIES.

THE tribes in the states of antiquity were constituted on a two­

fold principle : in some states the. arrangement was regulated by the
houses which composed the tribes, in others by the ground which
they occupied. It might seem as if the two principles must have
coincided, when at the settlement of a city a tribe consisting of
certain houses had a whole tract of land assigned to it; neverthe­
less this did not form its bond of union. Dionysius, who is a dili­
gent investigator of antiquities, makes this express distinction
between the earlier Roman tribes, and those of Servius, calling the
former genealogical, the latter local7 8 7; a distinction assuredly bor­
rowed from older authors. Aristotie, it is true, does not take any
notice of the hereditary tribes, any more than Polybius; for although
in his time such tribes must have been still subsisting here and
there, the notion of arranging a state according to combinations of
families would no longer have occurred to any legislator.
· The genealogical tribes were more ancient than the local, by
which they were almost every where superseded. Their form in
its utmost strictness is that of castes ; where one is separated from
another, without the right of intermarrying, and with an entire dif­
ference of rank; each having an exclusive unalterable calling; from
which, if there be any necessity, an individual may be allowed to
descend; ~ut to rise is impossible 88 , In course of time the severity
of these institutions relaxes, except where a divine law is given out
to be their origin, until there is a complete equality among the
tribes : when, among themselves,_ like the Venetian nobility, they

787 .puxttl l''"'"tl and TO?rl'1.<ti: Dionysius IV. 14.

88 This however does not prevent any one from seizing on the govern­
ment, who can do it by force of arms; as Amasis did: thus the Mahrattas and
their prince~ belonged to one of the lower castf's.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 235

form a democracy, although they may be the rulers over subjects

that outnumber them many times over. According to the principle
of this constitution, the houses are conceived to have existed before
the state; and the state to have been composed out of these its ele­
mentary parts : nor can any body belong to the state, unle3s he is
a member of a house; which, by the institution of castes, can only
be by legitimate descent. In the mildest form of such a govern­
ment, it is allowable to admit freemen connected with the state by
a community of national. law: and this admission may take place
by the resolution of a particular hous&'89 j or of. the majority in a
general assembly of the houses, or by means of definite powers
vested in a particular member of a house: in solitary instances it is
conceivable that even a whole house should be incorporated, that is,
in the room of an extinct one. For the total number is fixed, and
in no way can it be augmented.
The local tribes when first established are adapted to the divi­
.sion of a country into districts and hamlets : so that every one who
at the time when such a division was made, for instance in the
ag~ of Clisthenes in Attic~, was settled in any village as its demote,
was enrolled in the phyle to the Jegion of which the village be­
longed. . Now ordinarily the descendants of such a person conti­
nued members of the same phyle and the same deme, .without regard
to the place of their residence; whereby this division likewise ac­
quired a semblance- of being regulated by descent: and had the
great council been entirely closed against the admission of new citi­
zens, and had it been. impossible for a citizen to remove from the
tribe of his ancestors, the local tribes would have been transformed
into genealogical ones. This will appear distinctly further on,
from the account of a change of this kind in modern times*: in
antiquity there is no instance in which the object of'keeping the
'"state from being stifled by the bonds of hereditary privileges was
thus forD"otten. 1'he connexion of a citizen with his local tribe was
not in dissoluble : a family might. obtain a. removal into another
deme, though it is probable that the inducements to apply for it
were extr~mely rare : the number of the demes was variable : new
phyles might be added to the existing ones, or these might be re­

780 Thus an alien, who produced ·uninterrupted evidence of his honoura­

ble birth, lineao-e, life, and conversati<:m, was adopted by the houses of Dit­
marsh as a cou;in, an'd held in no less estimation than one who was born a
member.of the ~ept. See the chronicle ofNeocorus.
" . See the latter part of the section ~n the Six Equestrian Centuries.
236 HISTORY OF ROME.
modelled; and every one who received a franchise by a decree of
the people or by the law, was enrolled in a deme.
If any one makes the presumptuous attempt to frame a distinct
conception of the way in which states arose out of a foregoing order
of things where no civil society existed, he is forced to mount up
in thought to an age when such families as spring· from one stock
live united in a patriarchal manner into a little community: such a
community he will consider as a house; and the coalition of seve­
ral of them, as the social compact, the formation of a state. Aris­
totle himself in an unguarded moment gave way to this i11usion7Do;
and Dicooarchus explicitly deduced the houses from the ramifica­
tions of a common pedigree, and the phratries from combinations
of the houses by marriages1,
Now Aristotle perceived more clearly than any nne has ever done
since, that union in a political society is essential to human nature,
and that it is impossible to conceive a 'man, above a mere animal,
except as born and living in a state; nor could any one be Jess
inclined to search after imaginary beginnings of things: so that
assuredly he was not thinking in. this place of a primitive state of
humanity, but of one where the social union had been dissolved,
where the germ of it however wa,; still subsisting. The philoso­
phers of the .Lyceum had probably heard accounts of the settle­
ments that had arisen within the memory of man in perfect freedom
a1nong the hills of Epirus or lEtolia; and their mistake lay only in
confounding the systematical institutions· enacted by legislators,
with such as were the growth of nature, the prototypes which sug­
gested those institutions. For had there not been the 'example of
houses that had grown out of families, no one would have formed
any as the elements of states: just as the changes of the moon have
led to the division of the solar year into months, which nevertheless
do not bear any reference to the moon.
In those happier times when the Turkish empire was verging
without any hinderance to its dissolution and ruin through its own
barbarism and wickedness; and when the Christians under its yoke
were taking advantage of the growing sluggishness, rapacity, and
shortsightedness of their tyrants, to lay the foundations of freedom
for their posterity, which must have been attained but that the ma­
lice of fiends has converted the noblest hopes into the agonies of
790 When he applies the term op.o')'dlvJ.H.'td.C (Politic. I. 1), which is syno­
nymous with '}trVii''l'o<C (Pollux vm. 111.) to a family descended from a com­
mon ancestor.
91 See Stephanus Byz. v. Tii'l'po<.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 237

despair:-in those happier times when much that was great and
exceUent was suryiving here and there in that unfortunate country
unoMerved, and thus escaped being crushed and destroyed ; some
bands of free-spirited m~n retired from various parts of Epirus to
the mountains of Suli. There was formed that people, which by
its heroism and its misfortunes has left. the l\Iessenians far behind
it, and the extermination of which, through the agency of the Franks,
will draw down on our age the curses of posterity, long after all the
guilty have been called before the jullgment-seat of God. The Suliots
consisted of one and thirty houses or pharas7 9 ~: these, so far as we
can gather, were actually families descended. each from a common
stock; varying in numbers, but each having its captain,. who was
its judge and leader; the captains collectively made up a senate.
'Vhat renders the image of antiquity a complete one, is, that this
people was the sovereign over a considerable number of villagesos.
The constitution of many a little p~ople in ancient Greece and Italy
may probably have grown up in an equally simple manner. Now in
ancient times if a people of this kind migrated with its subject pea­
santry and' with other· companions, and s~ttling in a conquered
co~ntry increased so as to become a nation ; it would naturally
strengthen itself by forming a union between its auxiliaries and the
original houses, adapting its institutions to the example set by earlier·
states. ·when one of these sent out a colony, the leader of it mo­
delled the new people after the institutions of the country regarded
as its mother; divilling it into the sams number of phyles, and these
into as many phratries and genea, as were fonnd in the parent city,
according as it was a Dorian or· Ionian one. He separated, proba­
bly in every ~ase, his settlers and the strangers whom he incor­
porated, classing them according to their descent, and giving each
class a phyle of its own: in this ,Phyle he collected the individual
families into a determinate number of houses, however. dilfe~ent
their pedigrees, and without any regard to consanguinity: and the
union thus formed was· upheld by sacrifices offered up i_n common
down to the remotest posteri_ty. Of the rig~ts enjoyed by these
792 <l>"-P"j': it must be a merely accide11.tal coincidence that the Lombards
likewise called an aggregate of families Fara.
93 Its ?rtpfo11<01. · This account, applicable beyond a doubt to all the other
Albanian' and Romaic tribes, which were free until Ali Pacha became master
of the Venetian towns on the coast of Epirus, is contained in the beautiful
i<T<roplct 7 ou :!oii>.1 by Major Perrevos;. which in the hopeful times of Greece
was generally read there, and by which thousands of hearts must have been
warmed. It is extracted from him by Fauriel, in the appendix to the first
volume of his Greek songs.
238 HISTORY OF ROME.
associations almost every recollection muat have been lost in later
times, except, as was the case at Athens, among a few of the eupa­
. trids. ·
. It is uniformly laid down by all the grammarians who explain
the nature' of the Attic gennetes, and among the rest by Julius Pol­
lux,-who drew his invalu:;.ble accounts of the Athenian constitu­
tion, and the alterations it underwent, from the treatise upon it in
Aristotle's Politfrs-that, when the tribes were four in number,
each was divided into three phratries, and that each phratry com­
prised thirty houses. The members of a house, or. genos, who
were called gennetes or oµol'a'.'-1t.11.T•>. w.ere no way akin, but bore
this name· solely in consequence of their unionl' 04, This was ce­
mented by common religious rites, inherited from their ancestors,
•who were originally distributed into these housesos.
Now every thing in this statement is remarkable and pregnant
with consequences : the determinate and invariable number; its pe­
culiar character; the exp~ess contradiction to the notion of a com­
mon descent 98 ; and the fact of the Athenians having originally
been distributed into the houses.
For no one, however great his influence or wealth, who had not
inherited the ennobling quality of this original citizenship from his
ancestors, could be admitted into a phratry, or consequently into a
genos 97. -With the tribes of Clisthenes neither the phratries nor
the houses had the slightest connexion: those ti:ibes were divided
into deme.s ; and the gennetes of the same house might belong to

794 oj f<tTO;t,OV'l"'C 'TOU ')'EVOU> (e11.<t1'.0UV'l"o) -ytv'ii1a.1 (thus) xa.l oµo-yd.>-1t.rtfo,

')'EV£1 µiv •u ?rfo1T>l11.ovl2', i11. J'e Iii> 1Tvv0Jou oil1t:11 rrpo1T1t')'•p•vDµ•v01. Pollux vm.
9. 111.
!)5 oi •e dp;x}i> ,;, <ra. 1t1tl\06µ.va. 1-ivn 1t1t.Ta.v1µn9ivT•>· I-Iarpocration v.
1-mii'T<tl. An abundance of passages in point are referred to in Alberti's note
on I-lesychius v. ')"vviiTa.1 : to these has recently been added a scholium on
the Philebus, p. 80. d. and a passage in the Rhetorical Lexicon published in
Bekker's Anecd. 1. p. 227. !) ; which passage Eustathius had before him .
.From the words i'P"'' ITV'j-)'tvlit"'v 1-ovliTa.1 in the latter passage, and those of
Demosthenes against Eubulides, p. 131!). 2G: 'A?r6>.l\wvoc ?r<t.Tprf_ou 1<1tl A10>
'Epx.tlou 1-avnTa.l, (the accent seems to be very uncertain), I would correct the
corrupt passage, ll i'f"'' op)'[.,, ll va.uTa.1, in the law of Solon 1. 4. D. de col­
Iegiis (XLvn. 22.) by reading if i•P"'' op}[.,v -y•vvliT1t.1: at least this alteration
jij easier than one which in other rc_spects would be equally "\Veil founded,
1
~ itpl»V OP'}ll»VH, • )tiVVMTltl..
96 Stated the most positively in the Rhetorical Lexicon mentioned in the
.Jast note. ,
97 The notion is tb.e same as that of an old Christian was forme~]y in
Spa.in.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 239

different demes; 9s: foreigners too, who obtained the freedom of the
city, were registered in a phyle and a deme, but not in a phratry or
a genos 99 : hence Aristophanes says more than once, as a taunting
mode of designating new citizens, that they have no phrators, or
only barbarous onessoo,
The number of the phratries being twelve, and that of the houses
three hundred-and sixty, the grammarians were reminded, and with
very good reason, of the months and days in the solar. year: the
five for the odcl days could not have been introduced without occa­
sioning an inequality which was inadmissible.
Every house bore a particular name, in form resembling a patro~
nymic; as the Codrids, the Eumolpids, the Buta<ls: which gives rise
to an appearance, but a fallacious one·, of their baving helongecl to
the same family. These names may perhaps have been transferrecl
from the most distinguishecl among the associatecl families to the
rest: but it is more probable that they were adopted from the name
of some hero, who was their i?Toovu,uo~. Such a house was that of
the Hornerids in Chios ; their suppo::;ed descent from the poet was
only an inference drawn from their name, while others pronounced
that they were no way related· to bim 1 • What we take for a
family in Greek history was probably in many cases only a house
of this kind: nor is this system of distribution to be confined to
the Ionian tribes alone.
Now as a number of the Greeks believecl both in their own de­
scent, and in that of others, from'a heroic progenit~r; so at Rome the
Julii deducecl their origin from Iulus, the son ·of .lEneas; .the Fabii
theirs from a son of Hercules; the .lEmilii theirs from a son _of
Pythagoras. These particular pedigrees will not now fincl many
champions: such as arc still unwilling to abandon the opinion, that
a house was an aggregate of families which had sprung from the

708 See the.instance of the Brytids in the speech against Nerera, amongst
those of Demosthened p. 1365.
99 See the decree conferring the franchise on the Platreans, in the same
speech p. 1380. ' .
800 Frogs 41_9 : Birds 765. I formerly censured Barthelemy for assummg,
with the most express testimonies before his eyes, that each of the ten phyles
cuntained ninety houses (Anacharsis c. 26) : but he was misled by Salmasius,
whose dissertation on this subject (in his Observ. ad jus Attic. et Roman. c.
4.) is a complete failure.
1 Harpocration .v. 'O,u•pil«I. We may f~irly assume t~at a her~ nam:d
Homer was revered by the Ionians at the time when Ch10s received its
law8. See thP Rhenish Museum J. 257.
240 HISTORY OF ROME.
same root, but which for the most part were no longer able to
trace their mutual connexion, or more likely to take shelter under
the authority of Varro, who, in comparing the affinities of families
and of words, assumes that an lEmilius had been the ancestor of
all the 1Emilii802 , However since he is here speaking merely for the
sake of illustration, he would surely himself have deprecated our
construing such an illusion, as if it were a historical assertion. In
like manner the Greek mode of expression grew lax, and con·
founded the political with the natural union 3 the notion of a
house had already become obsolete: but what stress can be laid on
this, after the testimonies adduced, which are derived from Aris­
totle, and which so studiously oppose themselves to any m1sunder­
standing of this kind? "'
We have certainly no similar express testimony positively deny­
ing the existence of a family affinity among the members of a Ro­
man gens. But if a term which would have been sufficient by itself,
is wanting in-a definition, and above all in one which, being'a spe­
~imen,'aims at absolute completeness4 , that term is thereby excluded.
Had Cicero believed that the members of a gens 5 were of a common
origin, he would have had no. trouble in giving a definition of them:
as it is however, he says not a syllable of this; but determines the
notion by a successidn of attributes, each of which adds to its pre­
cision ; their bearing a common name ; being des_cended from free­
men; without any stain of slavary among their ancestors ; and hav­
ing never incurred any legal disability whether public or private.
Hereby ev-en the freed clients, though they bore the gentile name of
their patrons, are expressly excluded; while the freeborn foreigners,

802 Vt ab lEmilio homines orti lEmilii ac gentiles: de I. I. vn. 2. p. 104.

My attention was drawn to this passage by Salmasius Observ. ad Jus Attic.
et Rom. p. 122.
3 ~un,,,Hlc was originally synonymus with )'tYVli'T<tl : it is so used by
Herodotus (v. UG.), by lsams, and by Dionysiuscontinually, although custom,
which even at Athens was variable, had Jong before his day decided in favour
of its meaning kinsmen. , In the same. way it is forgotten that the German
word Vettern at one time did not mean kinsmen.
4 Cicero Topic. 6 (20). This description is framed according to the cir­
cumstances of the age ; and its object is to determine who was at that time
entitled to such inheritances as fell to the members of a gens: some genera­
tions earlier it would have run differently, more simply and more. distinctly.
But it was not Cicero's design to deduce the notion from its origin.
5 It is only in jest that he calls Servi us Tullius his gentilis, Tusc. Disp.
1. 16: but he would never have used this playful expression, if he had be­
lieved that gentility implied affinity of blood.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 241

who had received that name when they acquired the Roman fran­
chise, are recognized by the very exclusion of the clients. The
Cornelii as a gens had common religious rites ; but we cannot on
that account assume that any original kindred existed between the
Scipios and the Syllas. The Scauri were a genuine patrician
family; but their names do not appear in the Fasti before the
seventh century. The .iElii, being plebeians, can only be cited
here as a house belonging to a municipal town : they too con­
sisted of many families 808 ; and even the fabulous genealogy of the
Lam ii, who deduced their origin from Lamus of Formire, is a proof
that a particular family might believe its own descent to be different
from that of the other members of the house.
Now should any one still contend that no conclusion is to be
drawn from the character of the Athenian gennetes to that of the
Roman gentiles, he would be bound to show, how an institution,
which nms through the whole ancient world, came to have a com­
pletely different character in Italy and in Greece. Genus and gens
are the same word; the one form is used for the other ; genus for
gens, and conversely 7•
That the members of a Roman gens had .common sacred rites is
well known: these were sacrifices appointecJ for stated days and
places 8 : the N autii were under the obligation of offering such to l\1i­
nerva9; the Fabii, it may be conjectured, to Hercules or Sancus 10 ;
the Horatii in expiation of the fratricide committed by Horatius 11.
Such sacrifices became burthensome, as the members of the gens
who were.liable to them decreased in number; and the decrease
was inevitable : hence all sorts of attempts were made to get rid of

806 Fest. Epit. v. gens 1Elia.

7 Genus Fabium and Cilnium,for gens, Livy n. 46. x. 3. 5: genus Poly­
plusium, Plautus Captiv. n. 2. 27: Romani generis disertissimus: genus armis'
ferox, Sallust. Fragm. Hist. I. p. 933. 03G: Deum gens, 1Enea ! for genus,
1En. 1. 228 : and Virgil took this expression from a liturgical phrase. That
the general notion of a gens was regarded as equivalent to that of a nation, is
further shown by Livy saying nomen Fabium (n. 45), like nomen Latinum;
and by Dion Cassius calling the Cornelian gens 'l'o T"'v Kopv~,._i,.v q,iii.01,
XXXIX.17. .
8 Like the sacrifice of the Fabii on the Quirinal: Livy v. 46.
9 Dionysius v1. 69. Servius on 1En. n. IGG. v. 704.
10 Because they traced their origin to Hercules : that they were Sabines,
seems to follow from their chapel being on the Quirinal; consequently they
must have revered Semo Sancus; and Fabius may perhaps be the name which
lies hid under the corrupt reading Fabidius in Dionysius ir. 48.
11 Livy I. 26. Sacrificia piacularia gentis lloratiro. ·
1.-FP'
242 HISTORY OF ROME.

the bu~then, by expedients which the ancient jurists in vain la­

boured to obviate. The problem was, to shake it off without giving
up the gentile relation, so far as any advantage accrued from it;
'and as the change in the state of feeling in Cicero's age rendered
this feasible, he did not include among the terms of his definition,
what in Aristotle's time would of itself have been sufficient at Rome
as well as at Athens.
And unquestionably the belonging to a Roman gens, if it had its
burdens, likewise conferred advantages. The right of succeeding
to the property of members who died without kin and intestate,
was that which lasted the longest ; so long indeed as to engage the
attention of the jurists, and even-though assuredly not as any
thing more than a historical question-that of Gaius, the manu­
script of.whose work is unfortunately illegible in this part. That
no right of this kind is discernible in the writings of the Athenian
orators, must be owing to the changes in every social relation,
which at Athens hurried on far before those at Rome; the tide
there having set in toward democracy much earlier and stronger.
For the same reason we can still less expect that those orators
should make mention of the obligation which bound the gennetes
to assist their indigent fellows in bearing extraordinary burthens ;
an obligation which 41t Rome lay on the members of the house, as
well as on the clients• 12 : this bond did not outlive the times and
manners of remote antiquity. Even in Roman history we find but
a single iU:stance of it; when the clients and. gentiles of Camillus
pay the fine for him to which he had been sentenced.1 8 Subse­
quently the custom must have grown obsolete: the gentiles were
certainly not called upon, except when the means of the clients
were inadequate; and when the relations of clientship had extended
over the whole of Italy and still further, there was so seldom occa­
sion to call on them, that the right itself was forgotten. Yet even
so late as the second Punic war the gentiles wanted to ransom their
fellows who were ill captivity, and were forbidden to do it by the

812 Dionysius n. 10: (ilu 'l'ou' l'l'l?.<t.'1'«') 'l'i»r .:.va.?.,.fJ.d.'l'®Y ,,;, Tou, -ybu
wpornl,.01Td.I p.td)(."'·
13 Exe. Dionysii Mai. xm. 5. That u11-y-y1vel, in this passage means the
gentiles, is certain from the way in which Dionysius uses the terms, u11-y-ylv1,.<1.
lop« and ovop.«.-a.1 and uu-y-ymita.l iep,,,uilv<1.1. See Sylburg's Greek index.
The crll)')'nt'i, of Isagoras, who offer sacrifice to the Carian Jupiter (Herodot.
v. 66.), are his gennetes. These gentiles Livy probably found termed in
some chronicle the tribules of Camillus : that is, the members of the same pa·
trician tribe.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 243

senate~ 14 • This obligation is an essential characteristic of a gens :

and thus the patents of incorporation into the houses of Ditmarsh
in their amended form-for after the Reformation the practice of
forced compurgation was abolished as contrary to conscience-still
contains an engagement to come forward and aid the members of
the house tO the utmost in raising dikes or dwellings and under
every kind of disaster. The reciprocal exercise of this noble rela­
tion could not but in the first instance excite a feeling which led
them to regard each other like kindred, and by degrees a belief that
they were so. This assuredly was not a solitary local custom, but
common to the whole German nation : only where the German
tribes dwelt as conquerors it became extinct many centuries earlier;
and was retained nowhere but in my remote native province of
Ditmarsh, where no lord ruled and no slave served: and if the
chronicle which has preserved the patent had been lost, no trace of
it would have remained.
A striking coincidence hi character between the corporate houses
among the Greeks and in modern times, is presented by the fact
that compurgators used to appear at Cuma in aid of members of
their house. Aristotle only 'mentions their coming forward on the
side of the prosecutor 15 ; probably because he deemed this a still
more barbarous custom, than the use of the same means in behalf
of the defendant.
The analagous example of the Athenian houses leads us to sup­
pose, that at Rome likewise the number of houses contained in the
tribes was absolutely fixed.· Dionysius says, Romulus divided the
curies into decads 16 : what other subdivision can we conceive this
to be; except that into houses? its nature being such, that each
cury contained ten houses, and the three tribes three hundred.
Owing to this the patrician tribes might also be called centuries, as
they are in Livy; they comp!ised each a hundred houses. Here
we find the pervading numerical basis of the Roman divisions,
three multiplied into ten ; and three hundred stands in the same
relation to the days of the cyclical year 11, as the number of the
Athenian houses to those of the solar year. Moreover it corres·
ponds with the three hundred fathers in the senate: and the reason

814 Appian An~ibal. 28.. Ou1t. i7l"1'Tp1{tv ~ /Jou1o.~ 'Toir cru-y-yiv..-1 A6cr.i.-B.u
'Tovr «ix_µ«At»'To6r. He drew his account of this war from Fabius.
15 . Politic. n. 8.

16 , 11. 7. l1¥pnno ti 1<<1.l air lezci,,f,,_, <Li V>pi.'Tp<1.1 .;,..• a.inoii1 ul ii'}eµ~v

tI<ot<T'THV i1t.ocrµu 111<.til<L, l11<oupI~v '11"pocr<1.-yopwoµ1vor.

17 300 in~tead of304, as 360 instead of365. See a.hove p. 243.
244 HISTORY OF ROME.

why the senators of the colonies and provincial towns were called
decurions, was that this was the name given to the captain and
burgess of each house. Before Clisthenes enacted that fifty coun­
sellors should be sent by each tribe, every Athenian genos in the
same way must doubtless have had its representative.
Such numerical proportions are an irrefragable proof that the
Roman houses were not more ancient than the constitution; but
corporations formed by a legislator in harmony with the rest of its
scheme. A similar conclusion must be drawn with regard to the
German houses, which in the free cities and rural cantons appear
likewise in regular round numbers. In Ditrnarsh beyond doubt
there were formerly thirty houses 818 : at Cologne there were three
classes, each containing fifteen; the first, which originally was in
exclusive possession of the government, continued to have a supe­
riority of rank: at Florence there were seventy-two; and it cannot
be doubted that these were distributed in equal numbers among the
three classes of the lords, the knights, and the freemen, which
formed the tribes of the sovereign people in the Italian cities: the
classes at Cologne must have been of a similar nature. I have no
hesitation in believing the Italian traditions, that the freedom of
their cities was founded by the emperor Otho:. and I conceive that
he did it by collecting the Lombards, the Franks, the other Ger­
mans, and the Italians also, into houses, and by making their col­
lective body a free corporation. Even the word schiatta, the
appropriate term for this relation, is a mark of. a low-German em­
peror: it is the same word with sc!dacht, the low~German form of
the high-German geschlecfit: the J,om bards instead of it used f ara.
No more effectual method could have been devised for quelling the
power of the seditious Lombard grandee3; and as we find that it
was quelled, there must have been an adequate cause to contend
against it. The means used by Doria, whose wise. legislation res­
cued Genoa from the feuds between the Fregosi and the Adorni,
were, to break up the houses then existing, and to blend the fami­
lies contained in them together in the eight and twenty newly
formed Jl.lberglii, which retained the substance and name of the
old houses : if this plan was devised without any precedent in the
earlier annals of. the city, it is one of the most brilliant inventions
ever applied to the practical regulation of a free state. The estab­

818 This was ingeniously proved by Heinzelmann in a short treatise on

the Ditmarsh Nemede which appeared in 1792, the first and hitherto the last
inquiry into the ancient constitution and laws of my native province.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 245
lishment of houses in round numbers in the German free commu­
nities can scarcely have taken place at any other time than when
the subdivisions 'of the cantons were settled, and when the cities
were founded. I am far however from referring the first origin of
the associations to that period.. All that was then done, was, that
an ancient and wholly immemorial institution,-which must have
been common to all the German tribes, and which before the adop­
tion of Christianity must probably have had a further essential fea­
ture of resemblance to the form of society among the Greeks and
lfomans,-was adapteJ to the actually existing state. of circum­
stances, with which the old worn out order of things was no longer
in tune.
No institution of the ancient world. was more general than this
of the houses. Every body of citizens. was divided in this man­
ner ; the Gephyrreans and Salaminians as well as the Athenians,
the Tusculans as weUas the Romans: and in each case, when the
citizens of the dependent city were incorporated foto the common-
3.lty of the ruli.ng city, still the houses which had subsisted among
them, were not dissolved. In the constitutions of the municipal
towns, which in earlier times did not undergo any change on their
receiving the Roman franchise, the houses, so long as they were
of any importance in themselves, must also. have retained their po­
litical character: and when this had been done away wjth by time
and circumstances, they undoubtedly continu~d in the undiminished
possession of their civil and religious privileges. But they were
not aknowledged by the Roman state, their greater country, as
bearing any political relation to her: no houses but those which
compm;ed the three ancient tribes, were essential parts of the state:
and this enabled the patricians to boast that they alone had a
house 819 ; while nevertheless there were members of plebeian houses
at Rome by thousands, who possessed gentile privileges in the
munici1ial towns. On this superiority did the patrician Claudii
ground their claim to the exclusive exercise of the gentile privilege
of inheritance 20 ; it matters not that the claim seems to have been

819 Vos solos gentem habere." Livy x. 8.

20 Cicero de Orat. 1. 39. The claim of the patrician Claudii is at vari­
ance with the definition in the Topics (c. 6), which excludes the posterity
of freedmen from the character of gentiles: probably the decision was against
the Claudii, and this might be the.ground on which Cicero denied the title of
gentiles to the descendants of freedmen. I conceive in so doing he must
have been much mistaken. We.know from Cicero himself (de leg. 11. 22.)
that no bodies or a.shes were allowed to be placed in the common sepulchre,
246 HISTORY OF ROME.
unreasonable in this particular instance, where the Marcelli were
asserting a right which had no connexion with the political privi­
leges of the ancient houses.
The division into houses was so essential to the patrician order,
that the appropriate ancient term to designate that order was a cir~
cumlocution, the patrician gentes 821 : but the instance just mentioned
also shows beyond the reach of a doubt, that such a gens did not
consist of patricians alone. The Claudian contained the Marcellii;
who were plebeians, equal to the Apii in the splendour of the hon­
ours they attained to, and incomparably more useful to the com­
monwealth: such plebeian families must evidently have arisen from
marriages of disparagement, contracted before there was any right
of intermarriage between the orders 22 • But the Claudian house
had also a very large number of insignificant persons who bore its
name; such as the M. Claudius, who disputed the freedom of Vir-.
ginia: nay, according to an opinion of earlier times, as the very
case in Cicero proves, it contairted the freedmen and their descend­
ants. Thus among the Gaels the clan of the Campbells was
formed by the nobles and their vassals: if we apply the Roman
phrase to them, the former had the clan, the latter only belonged
to it.
The proposition that the patrons and clients made up the whole
of the original Roman people, is one of those the validity of which
is not to be questioned except when it is carried too far. False as
it is, and destructive to historical truth, if we do not acknowl~dge that
the plebeians were free, and if we overlook the nature of the com­
monalty ; no less. true is it, if applied to· the period before the

unless they belonged to such as shared in the gens and its sacred rites : and
several freedmen have been admitted into the sepulchre of the Scipios.
821 Plebes dicitur (according to Capito) in qua gentes civium patricii:e non
insunt. Gellius x. 20. Before the Licinian law, jus non erat nisi ex patriciis
gentibus fieri consules. xvu. 21. Instead of a patrician, Livy says 'Dir patri­
cii:e gentis, of L. Tarquitius m. 27 1 of P. Sestius III. 33: of M. Manliu(v1.
11. Even among the Italian Greeks in early times there is so great a proba­
bility that the terms gentile and patrician were used as equivalent, that we
are certainly not justified in altering the 4ext in Polymnus I. 29. 2; where
we read that Hiero in his war against the Ita!iots, o?l'O'T• A.tL~o1 'TIYtL~ tLi>;_f<tL­
.,,_,.'ToQ' .,.,.:, VV)")''Y"'v ~ :nav.-f,.v, conciliated them by his kindness. What
scribe would have substituted this word for ,;,,_,v,.v, as has been conjectured?
The ?l'Muu101 are the rich members of the commonalty, who did not belong to
a house, but nevertheless were persons of influence in their respective cities.
22 I here repeat the acknowledgement, a cherished memento of the de­
lightful days I once passed with Savigny, that I am indebted for this obaerva­
tion to him.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 247
commonalty was formed, when.all the Romans were comprised in
the original tribes by means of the houses they belonged· to. The
Patronus and JJ1atrona were the father and mother of .the family,
ill relation to their children and domestics, and to their dependents,
the clients823 • • .

How the clientship arose, does not admit of a historical exposi­

tion, any more than the origin of Rome. Dionysius compares this
relation with that of the Thessalian bondmen, the Penests : not
however that he himself conceived them both alike to have origina­
ted in conquest: his notion doubtless was, that Romulus separated
the noble and rich out of the thousands of his new citizens, to make
them patricians, and consigned the common people to their protec­
tion. According to his conception of the origin of Rome, he could
not retain his hold of ;hat comparison, which in substance is cer­
tainly founded in truth : the same relation which in Thessaly was
rude and revolting, might at Rome be more refined, in consequence
of different manners and a better spirit; the.condition and advanta­
ges of the ward who had placed himself of his own accord under
the protection of a patron, being transferred to the serf. A ward­
ship of this kind existed among the Greeks in the case of a so­
journer, who was bound to choose a citizen for his guardian24, in
order that he might not be an outlaw with regard to the commonest
civil rights : yet the condition of the Helots and Penests never
changed its hateful character. The Romans, and the citizens of such
towns as stood in .a federal relation to Rome, were mutually entitled
to exchange their home for the other city, perhaps under the obli­
gation, at all events with the right, of attaching themselves to a
patron: this is the meaning of thatjus applicationis, which we find
connected with thejus e:i;ulandi*. Many who availed themselves
of this right, as appears from the instance of accused Romans, wer~,
criminals, but such as the state had not been able to take into cus­
tody; and this practice being viewed with an evil eye by the ple­
beians, in their contempt for the clients, and their hatred of the
order whose power the clients upheld, hence came the legend about
the asylum.

823 The German word hOJriger, a depende:nt, from hi:ere:n, to hear, answers
exactly to diens, which comes from cluere.
24 His 'lrpocr-ra/tM. It answers to the German MuruJlierr, the Mundihur­
dus, as he was called in the Latin of the middle ages. '
* · Compare Cicero de Orat. 1. 39. (177.) with pro Cmcina, 33. (98.) 34.
(100.)
 248 HISTORY OF ROME.

In Greece this connexion rested only on reciprocal interest; and

might be given up and altered at will: it ceased as soon as the
alien obtained the franchise of the city, or even the privileges of,
isotely: at Rome it continued in the case of the rerarian; nay,
beyond doubt it was hereditary like vassalage. That it commonly
descended from one generation to another, Dionysius is aware;
only he looks on this as a voluntary prolongation. Most probably
he is mistaken: for with regard to towns and communities the.
hereditary eontinuance of the clientship is certain ; and whatever
may have been the doctrine in Cicero's days as to the relation in
which the descendants of freedmen stood to the house of their
original· patron, still, even if the claim of the patrician Claud ii in
the above mentioned case was unreasonable, the admission of freed­
men into· the sepulchre of a house is a proof, as I have· already hint­
ed, that the opinion which ascribed to them the character of gen­
tiles, has been rejected erroneously. If this be so, the duration of
this connexion being unlimited, we may infer the same as to the
clientship in general. And in truth. how should the clients have
obtained the name of the gens, as was also the case with those who
were received into a house without being natives of Italy, unless
they had been accounted members of it? And why should they
have been held unworthy of-the honour, when the slave, who was
, mostly an Italian prisoner of war, stood on familiar terms with
his master, as appeitrs by the Saturnalia, and ate at his table?
Those clients, who neither gained their livelihood by trade nor
had already acquired any property of their own, received grants
from their patrons of building ground on their estates, together
with two jugers of arable land: not as property, but as ,a preca­
rious tenement, which the owner might resume if he felt himself
injured. :But all, however different in rank and consequence,
were entitled to paternal protection from their patron: he was
bound to relieve their distress, to appear for them in court, to ex­
pound the law to them, civil and pontifical, On the other hand
the clients were to be heartily dutiful and obedient to their patron,
to promote his honour, to pay his mulcts and fines, to aid him jointly
with the members of his house in bearing burthens for the com­
mowealth and defraying the charges of public offices, to contribute
toward portioning his daughters, and to ransom him or any of his
family who might fall into the hands of an enemy. . , , ·
That great writer, Blackstone, who recognized the customs and
laws of ancient, times even in the games of children, makes an
 HISTORY OF ROJ\IE. 249
allusion to these burthens of the Roman clientship, when describ­
ing the ·duties of _vassals in the middle ages 825 •
If a client died without heirs, his patron inherited96 : and this

law extended to the case of freedmen; the power of the patron

over whom must certainly have been founded originally on the

general patronal rights. Now if P. Mrenius was able to put his

freedman to death for forgetting the respect due to his house 27 , and

this was deemed to be justifiable as well as wholesome severity;

we may infer that the patron could not only sentence his client to

lighter penalties when he himslf was aggrieved, but also sat in

judgment upon him when accused by a neighbour.

There was a mutual bond between the patron and the client,
that neither should bring an accusation or bear witness against th~
other, or give sentence in court against him, or in favour of his
enemies: this looks like a mitigated form of the old law of com­
purgation. The duties of the patron toward the client were more.
sacred than those toward his own kin 28 , 'Vhoever trespassed
·against his clients, was guilty of treason, and devoted to the infer­
nal .gods; that is to say, outlawed, so that any might slay him
with impunity. It is probable that the pontiff, as the vicegerent of
heaven; to which the cry of the injured party was 'raised, devoted
the head of the offender. To bring a charge before a civil tribunal
was impossible: its interference would have. perverted and de­
stroyed the whole relation;' which could not exist at all, or must·
admit of being abused. Still this abuse must have been threatened
with fearful punishment: for to imagine that the patricians, who
in their dealings with the plebeians neither respected equity nor
compacts ratified by oaths, should have let obligations which were
merely conscientious k~ep them such kind fathers toward their
clients, as many are not even to the children of their body, would
be a silly dream of a golden age, such as never .existed. They
were no better than those knights of the. middle ages, whose virtues
have been extolled by ignorance and falsehood; they who are
charged by a respectable contemporary with robbing the soccager
•
. .
825 Comme.nh.ries n. 5. p. 64. The feudal aids admitted of no exemption
in three cases : for ransoming the lord out. of captivity; for knighting his
eldest son; and for portioning his eldest daughter.
26 On this right, the existence of which was first perceived by Con·
nanus, see Reiz in his Preface to Nieupoort's Ritus Roman. p. xii.
27 Valerius Maximus v1. 1. 4. ·
28 Gellius v. 13. xx. 1. The classical passage on the patronship is the
well known one in Dionysius u. 91 10. · ·
I.-GG
 250 HISTORY OF ROME.
of his substance, as though he were a bondman, because they

could <lo it with impunity, since there was no judge between them

and the poor man except God. As if they ought not also to have

treated the bondman with kindness 1

Among the privileges which the Ramnes are said to have claimed
to the exclusion of the other patricians, according to a narrative
which assuredly represents their relation to the Luceres, one is that
of receiving strangers as clients 8 ~ 9 • · Still less then would they allow
this right to the plebeians: yet when distinguished men rose up in
the latter order, who could afford protection and redress, and grant
plots of ground to be held at will, clients attached themselves to
these as well as to the patricians. Until 'the plebeians obtained a
share· in the consulship and in the usufntct of the domains, free
foreigners, with few exceptions, must needs have applied to the
first order; in which however there may have been many with.
scarcely a client: and so long patron and patrician were co-exten­
sive terms.
Perhaps they were also synonymous: for the notion that the
patres were so called from their paternal care in assigning plots of'
arable land to the poor, as it were to their own children80 , is quite
in accord with the spirit of ancient times; although perhaps even
this explanation is still too artificial. 'For the· name may possibly
. have been only a simple title of honour used in addressing the
ancient citizens, whether in the senate or the assembly of the .
curies 3 '. It is by no means confined tothe senators; on the con­
trary the patres are mentioned even by Livy along with the senate:
arn.l wherever he speaks of the younger patres 8 ~, he conceives them
to stand in opposition to the senate. By the usage of later times
'inde~d the word was gradually restricted more and more to the
senators ; and even those writers who do not entirely exclude the
wider meaning, and who themselves fluctuate in their practice, are
still always inclined to interpret their authorities in the narrower.

82!) Dionysius 11. 62: e.p<t7t!U!O'BIU '7rpci~ 'l'QlY t71"H:>.UJ'Qly.

30 Patres senatores ideo appellati sunt, quia agrorum partes attribuebant
tenuioribus, pcrinde ac liberis propriis. Fest. Epit. completed by the help of
the fragment; • ' ' ,
31 In· the solemn lines, Dum domus .lEnere Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit, the words pater Romanus
designate a Romari citizen, in the language of very early times. Hence also
paterfamilias, which was used.at times to mean nothing more than a citizen.
32 The seniores and juniores patrum are often placed in opposition by
Livy, from the beginning of the plebeian disturbances until after the decem·
virate; the former being represented as inclined to conciliatory measures, the
 HISTORY OF ROME. 2'5L

Julius Cresar and Augustus raised certain families to the patriciate ;

because so many of the houses had become extinct, or had been
merged among the lower orders from thr.ir poverty, or had volun­
tarily passed over to the commonalty, that there were no longer
persons enough to. fill the priestly offices according to ancient usage.
Now the fifty families which were then still remaining933 , were cer­
tainly an old nobility in every respect ; and since those rulers
mixed them up with the most illustrious families among the plebe­
ian nobless, both Dionysius and Livy were hereby prepared to con­
sider the patriciate as a nobility from the first. Two centuries
earlier Cincius, whose weight as an authority I have already noticed,
had come to a totally different conclusion; namely, that anciently
all freeborn citizens were called patricians 34• This is to be referred
to the time anterior to the rise of the plebs : ~ven then however the
number of freeborn men among the clients must haye been consid­
erable. What is strictly accurate in the <;omparison, seems to be
-and perh_aps it was so expressed by Cincius, whose meaning we
can merely collect from the· abridgement of an abridgement-that the

latter as more ob~tinate and violent. Several times, as well during the first
disturbances, as in the affair of Creso Quinctius, we find a like statement on
the same occasions in Dionysius; whence it is clear that they both met with
it in the Annals. Iloth of them supposed these patres to be senators, differing
in temper according to their ages: but they must certainly have been mis­
taken. The dry old Annals can never have indulged in such delineations of
character: but they may have related from tr;i.ditions, that the general assem­
bly of the curies- had· often shown itself more headstrong than the senate,
which had the charge of the daily administration, and could not, like the for­
mer, reject a mea,sure without incurring any responsibility. In th~ senate
there were only the seniors, men who had passed the age of military service:
all the juniors sat in the curies: so indeed did those seniors who had no seats
in the senate; but their number was small, and the name of the assembly
war not determined by them. The following instance is the most .decisive:
L. Furius and C. Manlius, when accused, circumeunt s01·didati non plebem
magis quam juniores patrum: II. 54. This can never mean a mere part of the
senate: it is inconceivable that the accused should ha.ve neglected those very
senators whose age and authority were the greatest. Compare also II. 28. III.
14. 15. 65. The meaning Livy assigned to the phrase is the less dubious,
since in II. 28 he even talks of 'tninimus quisque uatu patrum. llowever the
most probable supposition is, that both the historians, being mjsled bj their
immediate predecessors, misunderstood who in all these passage~ wei:i the
mirwres, spoken of in the ancient books: for that word was certainly also used
to signify young men: as majores audire, m.irwri dicere. Compare note 1143.
833 Dionysius 1. 85. ·
34 Fest. Epit. v. Patricios. It does not follow from this passage that
Cincius mistook the nature of the termination, and fancied he saw ciere in it.
 252 HISTORY OF ROME.
patricians formerly stood in the same relation to the rest of the Ro·
mans, their clients, as the tribes of the ingenui did in his days to
those of the libertini. They were the true citizens: just as in Ger·
many, even during the thirteenth century, a member of a house and
a burgher were equivalent terms : and so we need not have any
scruples excited in us by the want of a class to occupy a middle
station between them and their dependents. Nor are we to be star·
tled at there being three hundred hous,es, which would be an in·
credible number for the nobility of a small state : nor again is it any
objection to this number, that the patrician gentile names which we
meet with, that is, in the Fasti, are very much fewer. For even
supposing, what must have been far from the truth,, that, when the
Tarquins were banished, the complement of the houses was full,
the consulate was unquestionably open but to a small portion of
them, although every one was eligible to it. In all aristocracies a
few families alone are illustrious and powerful: an incomparably
greater number continues needy and obscure, or becomes so: such
was the case for instance at Venice. The latter die off unobserved,
or they lose themselves among the common people, like the no­
bility in Ditmarsh and Norway: some of the Roman families too
renounced their patriciate of their own accord, and went over to the
plebs 835 : in other cases the same effect followed from marriages of
disparagement, before the right of intermarriage between the' two
' orders. w~s established· by the Canuleian law. Among the patrician
houses of this kind, which never occur. in the Fasti, are the gens
Racilia and Tarquitia36 : i:o are the Vitellii: and since the names of
the older plebeian tribes resemble the gentile names in form, andin
several instances are common to them with patrician houses, it is
also exceedingly p~obable that there was a gens Camilia, Cluentia,
Galeria, Lemonia, Pupinia, Voltinia37,
If patres, and its derivative patricii, were titles of honour for indi·

835 This w~ called the transitio ad plebem; with regard to which it is true
that in later times there were also a number of fables invented by plebeian
vanity! and accordingly this must certainly be the true reading instead of
a plebe transitiones in Cicero Brut. 16. The instance of L. Minucius is given
by Livy Iv. 16, and Pliny xvm. 4.
36 The great Cincinnatus was married to a Racilia before the Canuleian
la.w: L. Tarquitus was ma8ter of the horse during his dictatorship.
~ The Vestal virgins in ancient titnes were patricians no Iese certainly
than the priests. But the genuineness of the names ascribed to those who are
mentioned, such as Verenia, Canuleia, Opimia, Orbinia,. is too slippery ground
to build on.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 253

viduals, the name of the whole class, as distinguished from the rest
of the nation, appears to have been Celeres. That this was the
name of the kni'ghts, is recorded: as it is also-which indeed is
clear from the very nature of all the constitutions of antiquity-that
the tribes of Romulus had tribunes" 38 : and since the tribunate of the
Celeres is said to have been a magistracy and a priestly office, it is
palpably absurd to regard it as the captaincy of a body-guard. If
the kings had any such guard, it must assuredly have been formed
out of the numerous clients re·siding on their demesnes. The tri­
bunes of all the three tribes were certainly· at once leaders in the
field and magistrates and priests in the city; just as a curion, in his
character of centurion, which moreover was his name in the army,
was captain over a hundred in the Romulian legion39: but among
the three the tribune of the principal tribe must have enjoyed pecu­
liar distinctions; and hence we only find mention of one 40 •
Cicero speaks of it as a symptom of the anarchy and lawlessness
prevalent in the Greik states of his time, that measures were car­
ried by masses; by the aggregate number of heads, and not by the
votes of the several orders: the subjects however then open to their
deliberation were so trifling, that it was nearly indifferent in what
manner they were decided upon. In earlier times it was a princi­
ple in every legislatio~, whether the form of government was aris­
tocratical or democratical, that the weight of any individual's vote
and his liabilities, especially to milltary service, should be propor­
tioned to the number not of the whole community, but of the cor­
poration he belonged to: so .that every precaution was taken to
prevent the mob from turning the scale; and the more numerous a
man's corporation was in comparison with the rest, the lighter were
his burthens and the less impor:tant his vote. The same principle
prevailed in the constitutions of the middle ages founded on houses
and guilds. Now in the earliest times of Rome the question was,
whether the tribes or the curies were·to be the units, in taking the
votes of the whole body. But if the tribes, when only two of them
as yet possessed the right of voting, had differed in opinion, they
would have stood in direct opposition to each other in a manner
dangerous to the public peace: and after the thir<l order was added
to them, it would have felt itself placed on an inferior footing, if
'
838 For the former point see Pliny xxxm. 9: for the latter Dionysius II.
7: Pomponius 1. 2. § 20. D. 1. 2. de orig. jur.
39 Paternus in Lydus de Magistr. I. 9.
40 Dionysius however is an exception to this; inn. 64 he speaks of the
tribuni Celerum., like the other priests, as a college.
254 HISTORY OF ROME.
both the higher orders gave their votes ag~inst it. When the ques­
tion was to do away with antiquated but still burthcnsome privi­
leges, the third class might be unanimous in its determination, and
four-tenths in each of the first two tribes might agree with it: all
would be in vain. This was obviated by taking the votes accord­
ing tq curies; and the remedy was complete, when these were no
longer called up in any sta.ted order, so that the major houses should
take precedence of the Luceres, but in one settled by lot; this how­
ever was probably a later innovation.. .
Now as .there is no doubt that the families sprung from marriages
of disparagement, and the clients, shared in the sacred rites of the
curies841 ; one may be apt to think it probable that both those classes
likewise took part with the patricians in their comitia. The notion
that foreigners were admitted to the franchise of the curies, in the
same way as they were afterward to that of the centuries, does not
now need to be refuted.
'Vhen we consider the pervading principle of the institution, we
find it very difficult to conceive, that the votes taken in the curies
should have been those of the individual members, and not those of
the houses which were their component units: and that the latter was
actually the way of voting, seems to be attested by an express state­
ment of an ancient authoru. 'Vere this so, it may have been
nearly indifferent to the patricians as a body, so long as their rela­
tion to the other citizens continued to be substantially the same,
whether the inferior members of their houses had votes or not: for
the clients were not at liberty to vote against their patrons ; and so
the only effect would have been, that in every gens men of influence
would have exerted a preponderance proportionate to the number
of their clients, over those who c'ould confer no protection. As, to
families springing from marriages of disparagement, they rise up
-0nly by slow degrees.

841 Ifwe suppose that among the number of the extinct patrician houses
there was a gens Scribonia, of which only a plebeian family remained, it be­
comes less surprising that, when the plebeian nobility had far outstept the
patrician, and a great many plebeians, from causes which will be explained
further on, had been admitted to a share in the religious worship of the curies,
a Scribonius was made curio maximus.
42 Lrolius Felix in Gellius xv. 27. Cum ex generibus hominum suffra­
gium fcratur, curiata eomitia esse. Here too genus is equivalent to gens: see
note 807. 1t matters not as to the main point that lwminum must certainly be
a wrong word; the mistake too is one for which Gellius can hardly be made
answerable : his text iB still in want of an able oritic.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 255
But although it would not have been irreconcilable with the inte­
rests of the order, to admit such votes under such circumstances;
still it would have been diametrically opposite to the spirit of an
aristocracy; which, as was the case at Venice, requires an equality
within its own body between the poorest and the richest noble, an
absolute inequality between every noble and every plebeian: to
such an aristocracy it must have been worse than a stumbling-block,
had the vote of L. Tarquitius told for no more than that of a· client
0

to one of his rich gentiles. And th e above mentioned supposition

becomes altogether inadmissible, when we consider the changes
that time would make in the state of things. - The example of all
ages and places teaches us, that, so long as purity of lineage was
insisted upon, the patrician families in the houses must have been
rapidly decreasing. If the newly risen plebeian families and the
clients had voted in a house, they would have retained possession
of its vote, even though not a single patrician were any longer to
be found in it: and alnong the three hundred many must have been
reduced to this state in the course of a few generations 849 : so that
the patricians would have been unable to maintain the preponder­
ance even in their own comitia. Still more unfavourable to them
would have been the result of voting in the curies by poll.
The houses in their political chiracter being essentially patrician,
the definition pf Lrelius, just referred to, though it may not be an
absolute proof that none but patricians appeared in the comitia of
the curies, certainly establishes the correctness of the opinion, that
they formed the main part of those assemblies. Moreover the fur­
ther accourtt of the same Lmlius, founded on Labeo, stated, that the
comitia of the curies were convoked by a lictor, those of the centu­
ries by a hornblowcr4~: and Dionysius says that the patricians were
summoned by a messenger by name, the people by the blowing o.f
a ho-rn4 s. Thus we find that Labeo and Dionysius agree in uequivo­

843 That this would unavoidabiy be the case, will be clear to every one
acquainted with the history of the provincial nobility, wherever proofs of pedi­
gree are required.
44 In Gellius xv. 27. Curiata comitia per lictorem curiatum calari, id
est convocari; centuriata per cornicinem. Thus far the latter as well as the
former were calata, convoked: and as the patrician absolved himself from his
gens by the detestatio sacrorum and disposed of his property by will in the
presence of the populus, so the plebeian did the same before the exercitus.
But the account of the matter in Gellius is confused.
45 Dionysius ii. 8. 'l'ou' µh 'll"<L'<p11<lov~ o'll"o'l't J'of m ,...7,
~1:1.a-1'>.&u1T1
ITVl'l«LA&iv, .; 11.iipv1u, $~ ov6µ1:1.T6, <Ti ui 'll"<t.'Z'po9iv d.vn-ropavw 'I'D~, cl't Inµ•­
 256 HISTORY OF ROME.
cally designating the curies as the assembly of the patricians. The
same identity appears, on comparing the account of Livy, that Tar­
quinius Priscus assigned places foi: seats round the circus to the
patres and the knights, with that of Dionysius, who says he assign­
ed them to the curies846 •
In order however to give a complete and perfectly decisive proof
0£ this important proposition, I will here anticipate a topic, the
proper place for which lies somew hat further on, where I shall be
obliged to recur to it. ·
The most important piece of information on the Roman constitu·
tion contained in the newly discovered fragments of Cicero's books
on the Republic, is, that, after the kings had been elected by the
curies, they had i;;till to apply to the same curies for the imperium,
the refusal of which would have made their election void 4 7, Ci­
cero had the means of knowing this from the books of the pontiffs
and augurs; and extraordinary as it may sound, that the assembly
had to decide twice, and could annul its own election by the se­
cond decision, he asserts most distinctly that such was the case.
Nor was the assertion superfluous even in his time ; for Dionysius
and Livy both of them assume that the assemblies must have been
two different ones, as was the case after the time of s·ervius Tul­
lius. The electing assembly is taken by both to be the people ;
the confirmative one is called by the former the· patricians, by the
·latter the patres 48 : by which term he probably meant the senate ;
which was necessarily a- party to every decree of the curies; though
possibly in this place also he had the patricians in view, at least

rr1x.0U, V7r11pErrt.t1 i'f'JvS,, r:i.6p001 x.Ep~u1 ftoafo,, £µ.{iuxa.voovrr•,, i7Z'l 'Tct' txx"A.Jtfl'fttc
O'UVH)'DV· The mention of the kings here only means that the practice be­
,
longed to times long past; and the comitia of the curies became extinct soon
after the middle of the fifth century.
846 See below, note 8!.l3.
47 De Re p. 11. 13. (Numa) quamquam populus curia.tis eum comitiis
regem esse jusserat, tamen ipse de suo imperio curiatam legem tulit. 17.
Tullum Hostilium populus regem comitiis curiatis creavit, isque de imperio
suo-populum consuluit curiatim. 18. Rex a populo est Ancus Martius con•
stitutus : idemque de imperio suo legem curiatam tulit. 20. Rex est creatus
L. Tarquinius-isque ut de suo imperio le gem tulit, &c. Also of Ser. Tul­
lius; 21. populum de se ipso consuluit, legem de imperio suo curiatam tulit.
48 Dionysius 11. 60. .,.,,,, 71''1:rp11<loo1 t7l'txup,,, ...;,.,.;.,, .,.,,, J'o~<Lv.,.,,, "''!' 71'7-nBu.
Livy 1. 17. decreverunt, ut, cum populus regem jussisset, id sic ratum esset,
si patres auctores fierent. Jn this form Numa's election is conducted. 22.
Tullum-regem populus jussit, patres auctores facti. 32. Ancum Martium
regem populus creavit, patres fuerunt auctores. 41. Servius injussu populi,
volw1tate patrum regnavit.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 257

indistinctly, as he had elsewhere more frequently than such a

sense is assigned to him. At all events every reader will see,
without need of many words to prove it, that what Cicero calls the
lex curiata de imperio, is precisely the i,iame thing as the auctori­
tas patrum in Livy, and the confirmation by the patricians in Dio­
nysius.
And thus. it is now further clear that the auctorit~s patrum,
which, until the l\fanian law, was indispensable to the validity of
elections, was nothing else than the lex curiata de imperio, which
even the dictators were forced to obtain. But those patres were
the patricians ; they are called so most distinctly849 : history cannot
supply a more conclusive proof than this for the identity between
the comitia of the curies and the assembly of the patricians.

849 Livy VI. 42, when L. Sextius was elected consul: ne is quidem finis
certaminum fuit. Quia patricii se auctores futuros negabant, prope secessionem
plebis-res venit, &c. Sallust in the speech of C. Lacinius Macer, p. 972.
Virilia ilia quo-libera ab auctoribus patriciis suffragia majores vestri paravere.
Here Sallust must certainly have been making use of a speech actually com­
posed by the learned antiquary Macer. Dionysius writes with regard to a
transaction substantially the same, in one place, v1. 90, '!"Ou' 7r<t'l"p1,.[ou' .;.,lir­
Tn•
etne' ;,,.,,.up<»IT<tl 'TnY dpx.ilv ·F<l>•Y t7l'oe:y1<etY'I""-'• in another, x. 4, eti <1>pd'l"pet1
../-n<1>•• t71'1~lpouir1y-to which I shall advert again when I come to the institution
of the tribunes of the people : see note 13G3. Here we catch a glimpse of some
Roman writer; I would wager, of the same Macer; for Dionysius himself had
no cloe in this labyrinth. Of the patricians too in the strictest sense is it said
in the Declamation pro Domo 14. (38.), that, should they become extinct, the
republic would be in want of flamens, Salii, and so on, and of the auct()J'es
centuriatorum et curiatorum comitim-um. Here the half-informed rhetorician
betrays himself: he had probably read the passages just quoted from Cicero's
books on the republic (note 847) : and he did not reflect that in Cicero's days
there were no other curiate comitia than the mere formal assemblies for con­
firming elections.

I.-HH
 THE SENATE, THE INTERREXES, AND

THE KINGS.

THE contemporaries of Camillus, though they had a firmly

rooted belief in the legends about Romulus, would have laughed at
ariy one who, as the most intelligent men did three centuries after,
should have represented the institution of the senate as a measure
of policy issuing from the free will of the founder of the city. In
all the cities belonging to civilized nations on the coasts of the Me­
diterranean, a senate was a no less essential and indispensable part
of the state than a popular assembly : it was a select body of the
elder citizens: such a council, says Aristotle, there always is, whe­
ther the constitution be aristocratical or deinocratical : even in oli­
, garchies, be the number of shares in the sovereignty ever so small,
certain counsellors are appointed for preparing public measures 850•
'rhat the Roman. senate, like the Athenian one established by
Clisthenes, corresponded to the tribes, has already been explained:
but we may go further, and affirm without hesitation, that origi­
nally, when the number of houses was complete, they were repre­
sented immediately by the senate, the. number of which was pro­
portionate to theirs. The three hundred senators answered to the
three hundred houses, which was assumed above on good grounds
to be the number of them: each gens sent its decurion, who was
its alderman, and the president in its by-meetings, to represent it
in the senate. The Spartan -repwr" were eight and twenty, a sin·
gular number ; but since the two kings along with the rest made up
thirty,_ it may be explained according to the same hypothesis.
There were thirty houses represented51 , the Agiads and Eurypon­

850 ?tpo~ou>.o1, procuratori. Aristotle Polit. IV. 15.

51 These thirty senators corresponded to the number of days in a month.
ln the Roman number of three hundred there is a reference to the days in the
ten months of the cyclical year: in that of the Attic houses to those in the
11olar year of twelve months. See note 817. The numbers in the political
 HISTORY OF ROME. 259
tids by the kings : these names, when the descent of the two houses
from twins had become an article of popular belief, were derived
from certain alleged descendants of those mythical brothersss2.
Tha~ the senate should be appointed by the kings at their discre­
tion, can never have been the original institution. Even Dionysius
supposes that there was an election: his notion of it however is
quite untenable, and the deputies must have been chosen at least
originally by the houses, and not by the curies.
The senate was divided into decuries: each of these correspond­
ed to a cury. When the state was without a king, ten senators
presided over it during the interreign: the mode of proceeding on
these occa.sions is another of the points on which the accounts given
by our historians are contradictory: and no wonder; for no such
magistrate had then existed within the last three centuries 5s. Ac­
cording to Livy, when there were but a hundred senators, one was
nominated in each decury. These together formed a board of ten,
each of whom enjoyed the regal power and its badges as interrex
for five days; if no king was created at the expiration of fifty days,
the rotation began anew. Dionysius on the other hand states, that
the two hundred patres, of whom the senate was composed at the
death of Romulus, were divided into twenty decuries, and that one
of these w~s chosen by lot as the interregal board; and, when their
time had expired, another. Plutarch finally, taking the number of
senators at a hundred and .fifty, says nothing of any decuries, but
relates that the royal power went round from the first to the last, so
as not to remain more than half a day and half a night with each;
institutions of antiquity were never arbitrary; and when we find an unusual

one, we. are naturally curious to inquire its meaning. From a like reference

I would explain the singula.r number of the council of One Hundred and

Four at Carthage (Aristotle Polit. II. 11.)'. This is twice the number of

the weeks in a year: such a distribution of time, wholly independent of

the celebration of the Sabbath, would seem to have been common to the

Phenicians with their neighbours, and to have been the basis of a politi­

' cal division, as the months were among the Greeks and Romans. In no na­

tion is such a scheme more probable, than in that which raised altars to the

Yeat and the Month, and paid divine honours to them, as 'to other abstrac­

tions: this is related of the inhabitants of Gades by Eustathius, on Dionys.

Perieg. v. 453, from lElian.

852 The tworoyalhouses'were not quite equal-ol,.;., i.,, ,,.;;,
vt:Odl<tJ"'Tlf"'•
says Herodotus (v1. 51) of Demaratus~d perhaps the tribes of houses never
were so at the first. The three Argive royal houses in mythical story-that of
Anaxagoras, of Bias, and of Amythaon-were invented in order that in like
manner they might stand for the three tribes.
53 There was to be sure an interreign in the year 701 : but all proceed­
ings at that time were arbitrary and lawless.
 260 HISTORY OF ROME.
and then, if the people still continued without a king, the rotation
commenced anew 854 • This last account falls with the hollow basis
on· which it rests, the number he assigns to the senate: and Dio­
nysius was thinking of the Attic prytanies, and assumed that all the
senators must have stood on an equality. In Livy's statement there
is a reference to the superiority of the Ramnes; and we see the
decem primi, the ten, each of whom was the first in his decury 55 :
we need not hesitate to decide in its favour.
The senate-and, so long as the right of election was exercised
by one tribe alone, the decuries of that tribe-agreed among them­
selves on the person to be proposed by the interrex to the curies;
whose power was confined to accepting or rejecting him. It was
a rogation, as in the case of a law; and hence the interrex is said
rogare regem, to put his acceptance to the vote. In this way is the
creation of Numa and Ancus .related: as to Servius Tullius, he is
said to have usurped the throue without a previous election by the
senate56 • Afterward the same system continues for a considerable
time in the consular elections: and so does the use of the word rogare.
When the king had been accepted, his inauguration took place,
in order to give him the immediate sanction of the gods; and there
may perhaps have been a time of honest credulity when adverse
auguries would be a ground for proceeding to a new election. Even
this however was not sufficient to give the new king the full power,
the imperium: it was necessary that he should be invested with it
by a specific law, which he himself proposed, and the rejection of
which would have compelled him to resign his dignity. The ori­
gin of this practice seems to have been, that in very ancient times,
· though the Quirites were to hold the office in turn, the election
854 Livy 1. l7. Dionysius n. 57. Plutarch Numa, e. 2.
55 The expression of Dionysius, 'Toi, ""X'"""' Jfa<t. '!l'prhOI' d7riJ'"'""''
a."p;i:.uv, shows that he found the phrase decem primi in the Annals. Unless
h; ha~ meant to indicate this, he would have written 'Toi' '!l'f"''"" ~r1.;tov1TI
'"""··
56 Dionysius 11. 58. '!l'pou;tt1pi,,.r1.no (oi 7rptlT~U'l"tpoi ~·~"•u'l"rtl)-N•µ•W
.;, J'I 'l"OU'I"' u.e., flV'TOi,, O"U)'lf.ltAOUQ"I 'TO '!l'A;;e., •h tlf.lf.l\HO"l.;.V. "'"' '!l'<tpt;..$111,
'e <tU'T/111 • 'TOTI P,IO"O~<J.O"ll\IU' "'· 'T. "· III. 36• .; P.'""'~11,u{;..eio' «pxn ttipeiT<tl
~oc.-1;..&., •A'Y"'"' e:>r1xuplli,,.11.n°' JI 'l"•li l>iµou 'l"tt. Joectntt. 'T' P,ou"' "· 'T. "·
1v. 8. ov1t. .reioun" ('rdv 'ruuiov) t«u'Tlf µn;i:.11.vi!.-ct.-Bct.1 ~" ..'"'"'"' &;ou,,.f<t.v,
p.1i'T1 {dou;..Y,; ..j.H<l>11Td.1<..£vn,, µ1f'l"t 'TQlV t1."l\l\QlV 'TQlV 1t.d.'Td. VOfl-~1 f'!l'l'TtAt0"9fV'i"QlV.
In the subsequent part of the account of Numa's election, which I have not
transcribed here, it looks as if the interrex proposed the candidate for the
kingship of his own authority : but this semblance is dispelled by the way in
which the election of Ancus is represented. Dionysius however was perhaps
somewhat inattentive to what he was saying.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 261
rested with the Ramnes; after which however it was requisite that
the person elected should be approved of by the other order: and
this was done by the curies of the. two tribes conferring the impe·
rium. , On the elevation of the third tribe, it was in like manner
fair that its curies should be summoned to express their acceptance,
when the election had been completed by the other two. An insti·
tution of this sort will outlive the causes that produced it; one hi
however disposed to seek for reasons why it was maintained when
the election was carried on by all the curies conjointly. It may
either have been that the person nominated had, like the Greek
magistrates, to undergo a scrutiny and prove that there was nothing
rendering him unable or unworthy to enter upon his office; and the
delegated examiners were to make their report on the subject to the
curies 85 7: or the entrusting so great a power was deemed by free
men a measure so grave and hazardotts, that they reserved them·
selves the power of deliberating upon it twice over. The latter was
Cicero's view, even with regard to the annual and limited magis.
tracies 58 • As the curies however could not come to a vote on any
matter which was not brought before them by a decree of the senate,
there must have been such a decree in this case also: and if we
. suppose that the first choice was made originally by only a part of
the senate, there would be the same ground for this second .decree
as for taking the opinion of the curies. When these had ceased to
exist except as a mere name, the senate still retained the power of
refusing its assent: owing to this it was compelled to express its
acceptance previously to the matter being proposed to the people;
and the continuance of this formality misled Livy into supposing
that the patres who had to give ·their assent in the earliest ages,
were the senate.
The law· of the curies invested the king with all the power he
needed as head of the state and of the army; and with authority
to hold courts and appoint judges 59 • The extent of this preroga·
tive cannot possibly be defined: thus much however I consider to
be certain; that. the celebrated lex regia concerning the emperors,

857 This would be the province of the pontiffs ; because the kings had so
important a.. share in the divine service: and the preliminary scrutiny, the
J'oxlfl<tlFi«, could certainly belong to none but those who 't<t' "fX."-' «71',;.IF<t'
00"tt.H' Buvlt.t. '?'" n 6•p«.1ttltt. 8tt»J ftfJctX.U~«'• xtt.I ToUc iapt'i, 0:7rr.L'l'Ttt.r; i!•rrtt.~oucro.
Dionysius 11. 73. Moreover they presided in the comitia. of the curies.
58 de I. agr. n. 11. (26.)
59 Judicia, fJU<lJ imperio continehantur; which in those days cannot pos­
sibly have been defined.
262 HISTORY OF ROME.

which has been the subject of so much controversy, was no other

than the law which granted the imperium to the kings; though
with alterations as well as additions. A law which had been pro­
posed by a king, was a lex 1'egia; not so one which related to con­
ferring regal power on such as were not kings. The table con­
cerning the imperium of Vespasian is a law, not a decree of the
senate860 : though under the emperors any comitia but such as were
mere forms, like those of the curies, are out of the question. · It
must 'have been in the Papirian code that the forn:iulary by which
the imperium was granted to the kings, was preserved.
The kingly office at Rome in its power, perogatives; and restric­
tions, resembled that of the heroic age in Greece: it differed, in
being a magistracy granted only for life. The king had the abso­
lute command of the army, and was the priest who offered sacrifices
for the nation : when within the city he must have been the only
person entitled to convoke the senate and the people, and to lay
measures before them: but laws, and questions of war and peace,
were determined upon by the citizens 61 ; though there could be no
precise limits to the power of a successful and favourite prince.
He had the right of punishing the disobedient with corporal penal­
ties and fines : an appeal however lay from such sentences to the
assembly of the citizens 6 ~; a privilege which we cannot conceive
to have been enjoyed by any but the patricians. Every ninth day
the king held his court63 : to his tribunal belonged the adjudication
of property and persons, the protection of legal possession; in a
word every thing that was subsequently included in the jurisdiction
of the prretor, even the assigning a judge: if he chose however to
determine causes in person, he might do so. His power over resi­

860 Since this was written I have found out that this law had already been
recognized by Ernesti to be the lex curiata de imperio. Excurs. II. in Oberlin's
Tacitus, vol. II. 865. His scruples about its genuineness would have van­
ished at the first sight of the original; or if he had been aware that it was
already known in the time of the glossographers1 and regarded as one of the
twelve tables. Owing to this it was carried to the Lateran, as a relic of an­
cient Rome.
61 Dionysius II. 14. vi. 66.
62 Provocationem etiam a regibus fuisse declarant pontificii libri, signifi­
cant nostri etiam augurales. Cicero de Re p. 11. 31. See below, note 1176.
63 Macrobius 1. 15. Tusci nono quoque die regem suum salutabant, et
de propriis negotiis consulebant. The feelings which the recollection of this
usage kept alive, were probably the occasion of the separating the nones and
the nundines ~ Macrob. 1. 13: not the fabulous cause assigned for it. See
notes 721, 910.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 263

.dents within the pale*, and over all that did not belong to the houses
of the citizens, had no bounds, any more than that of a dictator.·
Booty and land acquired in war were at his absolute disposal, so
far as the claim of the citizens to the usufruct did not. stand in his
way. A part of the conquered territory fell to the share of the
crown; which had extensive demesnes attached to it, cultivated by
its vassals 1 A4 , and supplying it with riches and with a devoted train.
Over the administration of the pontifical law the king did not pre­
side: ·the independence of the augurs is appar~nt from the legend of
Attus Navius; that of the pontiffs is quite as unquestionable.

* See the text to note 961.

864 Agri, arvi et arbusti et pascui, lati atque uberes, definiebantur, qui
essent regii, colerenturque sine regum opera atque labore. Cicero de Re p.
IV. 2.

·.

 TULLUS IIOSTILIUS AND ANCUS.

IT was from the books of the pontiffs and augurs, that Livy took
the formularies for the solemn proceedings of the Roman law; for­
mularies which, after prevailing for many ages, had in his day long
been obsolete, and the origin of which was traced back to the kings.
It is certain that it was from this source he derived the formu1ary
used in trials for treason, containing the evidence for the existence
of that appeal to the people, which Cicero had found mention of in
the pontifical and augural books 865 : nor is it more doubtful with
regard to those which were used in consecrating a king, in the pro­
ceedings of the pater patratus at a treaty, in those of the fecials,
and in the surrender of a city. A conjecture about the nature and
char~cter of these books may be hazarded without presumptuously
prying into what fate has forbidden us to know. We ~an only con­
ceive them to have been collections of traditions, decisions, and de­
crees, laying clown principles of law by reporting particular cases 66 :
and thus fragments of old poems might be contained in them, such
as the law of treason from the lay of the Horatii.
The actual narrative of the times of the kings Livy, guided by
his poetical feeling, drew mainly from Ennius: this seems to be
demonstrated by his assuming the same period for the duration of
Alba, which is presupposed by the chronology of that ancient poet67;
and surely it cannot have been a mere work of chance, that the
words in which Cocles invokes the god Tiber should be so nearly
the same in the two accounts 68 • ,He could not have selected more

865 Above, notes 687 and 862.

66 As was done in the eastern collections of traditions, and even in the
Pentateuch: see Numb. xxxv1.
67 Above, pp. 155 and 205.
68 Tiberine pater, te sancte precor, hmc arma et hunc militem propitio
flumine accipias. Livy n. 10. Teque, pater Tiberint>, tuo cum flumine
sancto. Ennius, p. 41.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 265
judiciously: and so long as the history of Rome shall continue to
be written, the narrator in this part has no choice but to translate
Livy; or, if his work, like mine, will not admit of such details, to
give a simple record of poems, with which we may happily pre­
sume every one to be familiar in Livy's excellent representation of
them.
If any one looks for historical truth, and consequently for con­
nexion, in the story of the first century of Rome, he must find it
wholly incomprehensible that Alba should disappear altogether the
moment the city is founded. The tradition neither tells us of any
aid sent by the mother city during the danger that threatened Rome;
nor does it explain how, when the race of JEneas became extinct
with N umitor, Romulus was excluded from their throne. Both
what is said, and what is not said on this point, tends to establish
the nature of those accounts, which are given us for historical.
Alba and Roma were entirely strangers to each other: in the legend
which relates the fall of the former city, it is not the Silvii who
rule there, but C. Cluilius or Fuffetius, as dictator, or prretor.
Mutual acts of violence had been committed by the citizens of
the two cities; and it fell out that both were sending embassies to
demand satisfaction at the same time. In order to render the Al­
bans responsible for having unjustly refused to make atonement,
the Roman king detained their ambassadors by festivals and ban­
quets, declining to introduce them into the senate ; until the Albans
had refused to deliver up the offeriders to the Roman envoys, and
these had thereupon declared war against Alba869• The armies of
the two cities were drawn up against each other on the Fossa Clu­
ilia, where it crossed the Latin way and the boundary of the Roman

869 Bellum in trigesimum diem indi:rerant, says Livy: according to the

fecial law however it was the practioe, after the lapse of three respites, each
of ten days (or likewise after thirty-three days), to declare, that it was uow
time for the elders at home to take counsel, whether they should avenge their
wrong by war; and such assuredly was the account the ancient poet gave in
this place. No doubt the change had been made long before Livy's time by
the annalist he followed, though the number was not altogether abandoned :
and certainly it was startling, that thirty days should have elapsed, without
the Albans at Rome hearing of the demand made in their city by the fecials.
However what need had the poet of calculating the actual distance?· He had
the right of enlarging it, as much as served his purpose : just as Herodotus
and Xenophon on the contrary speak of the Medes and Persians as if their
country were not more e:rtensive than that of a small Greek people, nay of a
11ingle city with its domain. '
1.-11
266 HISTORY OF ROME.

territory e7o: the princes came to an agreement to avert a battle by

a combat. There were in each army three brothers, of the same
age, the Horatii and the Curiatii ; their mothers were sisters, and
had both brought their sons into the world at a birth7•, The an·
cient narrators varied in calling sometimes the Horatii, and some·
times the Curiatii, Romans or Albans: it was only the later hista.
rians who came to a decision on this point; nor is there any better
authority than their caprice for the opinion which is now universal,
and which I too shall follow, that the former were Romans. Two
of the Horatii had fallen ; the third was left unhurt to contend
against three wounded foes, and by craft and skill overcame them.
At the gate of the city his sister met him, and cursed him in her
despair, on seeing him conducted by the exulting army, and bear·
ing aloft the spoils of the slain, among the rest the embroidered
cloak of her betrothed which she herself had woven: anger seized
him and she fell by his hand. The judges of blood c~ndemned
him to be hung upon the fatal tree7 9 ; he appealed to the people,
and they gave him his life.
For the compact had been, that the nation whose champions
should be victorious, was to command the obedience and service of
the other: and the Albans fulfilled it. When Fidenre however,
having driven out or overpowered the Roman colonists, was de­
fending itself with the assistance of the Veientines against Tullus
and the Romans, in the battle that ensued the Romans stood against
the Veientines; on the right, over against the Fidenates, were the
Albans under their dictator Mettius Fuffetius78• Faithless and yet

870 That is, near Settebassi, between the fourth and fifth milestone from
the Porta Capena, on the road to Frascati : for the Via Latina, which was
much older than the Via Appia, led in those days to Alba: see above, pp. 155,
156. Let those who go along that road think of the Horatii in this part of it.
The name of the ditch was unquestionably derived from an Alban prince : for
the sake ofexplaining this name, the story was in.vented that the armies were
encamped a long time in this place, and, since Fuffetius appears subsequently
as the prmtor of the Albans, that Cluilius died here. The oldest tradition
must have represented the princes as coming to an agreement from the first
that they would meet, each attended by his people, at the borders of their
territories, and leave the decision of their quarrel to the gods. ·
71 Every body will perceive that we have here types of the two nations,
regarded as sisters, and of the three tribes in each of them.
72 The phrase, am argen nordern Baum Henken, in the Frisian laws,
answers to infelid arbore suspendere.
73 Mcttius, not JIIettus, would have been the reading in Livy, as well u
in Ennius-in whom it is to be pronounced JIIettieo Fujff:tie6-and in the
Greek writers, unless the authority of the manuscripts had been disregarded.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 267

irresolute he drew them off from the conflict to the hills: the Etrus­
cans, seeing that he did not keep his engagement to them, and sus­
pecting that he was threatening their flank, gave way, and fled along
by his line; when the twofold traitor fell upon them in their dis­
order, in the hope of cloaking his treachery. The Roman king
feigned himself deceived: on the following day the two armies were
summoned, to receive their praises and rewards. They whose
courage forsakes them in the execution of a· criminal plot, will sur­
render themselves to vengeance, if it be dissembled, with a view of
avoiding what might confirm the suspicion that such a plot had
been formed. The Albans came without their arms, were sur­
rounded by the Roman troops, and heard the sentence of the inex­
orable king; that, as their dictator had broken his faith both. to Rome
and to the Etruscans, he should in like manner be torn in pieces
by horses driven two opposite ways; and as for themselves and
their city, that they should remove to Rome, and that Alba should
be destroyed. It was carried into execution. ·The city, being
already stripped of all its men capable of bearing arms, was sur­
prised, and razed, to the sound of trumpets•74, all but the temples.
Tullus assigned the Albans habitations on the Crelian: and this
is a point the legendary history of Rome may rely on, because he
was regarded as the founder of the Luceres. Else the settlement
on the Crelian was ascribed by other stories to Tuscans; some plac­
ing it as far back as under Romulus, and others again much later
than Tullus. All the patrician houses that deduced their stock
from Alba, belonged to the Luceres; even the Julii: and the fact of
their having come from Alba, I hold to be historically certain, as
well as the fall of Alba. But the war which terminated in that fall
has only an indefinable historical foundation, like the Trojan war.
The probability is, that Rome in conjunction with the Latin towns'
took Alba, and that the allies divided the territory and the people
they had conquered. For by the Italian law of nations, which in
such a case of a total destruction would also be the law of nature,
the Alban territory must have become the property of the conqueror:
yet we find it in the possession not of Rome, but of the Latins;
here, at the fountain of Ferentina, below Marino, did they hold
their national assemblies7 5 • Or perhaps Alba may have been de-
The proper names of the Latins resemble gentile names in their terminations;
as Octamus.
874 Servius on 1En. II. 313.
75 Livy 1. 50. vu. 25. Dionysius seems to confound this place 'with the
Ferentinum of the Hernicans.
268 HISTORY OF ROME.

stroycd by the Latins, not by Rome, and the Albans who retired to
Rome may have been received there as refugees. Thus the de­
molition of Fiesole, and the carrying away the Fiesolans to her
pretended daughter city, is the earliest point that passes for histo­
rical in the story of Florence. The interval between the year 1008
ancl Machiavel is less by near 150 years than that which was
reckoned between Tullus and Livy; the oldest chronicles related
it: and now the Tuscan critics have long since proved that Fiesole
continued to exist for many ages after that pretended destruction in
the very same state as before.
After the fall of Alba began the wars with the Latins, who dwelt
on both sides of the Anio in a semicircle about Rome, the Tiber
founing its chord. Of that war with them, 'vhich Dionysius relates
to have arisen even in the time of Tull~s, in consequence of Rome
pretending to have acquired the supremacy ascribed to Alba, Livy
is ignorant. He does however mention a·n alliance concluded
under that king with the Latins: and the existence of this alliance,
as a confederacy in arms, not with the Latins alone, but also with
the Hernicans, such as that" formed by Sp. Cassius, is implied in
a narrative preserved from Varro, which has a historical air 576 , It
relates that the troops of the allies under generals from Anagnia
and Tusculum encamped upon the Esquiline; and covered the ,city
whilst Tullus was besieging Veii; and this war is connected with
that against Fidenre, just as there is a like connexion in the legend
of Romulus: Livy, who passes over it here, nevertheless seems to
include it in the total number of the Veientine wars77,
In the time of Tullus the Sabines were the most powerful people
in all Italy, next to the Etruscans. Tullus warred against them
with success ; until the anger of the gods at the neglect of their
service, and at the decay of the piety inculcated by Numa, was an­
nounced by a shower of stones on the Alban mount, and by a pes­
tilence. The king himself grew sick, and sank despondingly into
a restless superstition. As the gods persisted in their silence, and
would not grant him any sign revealing the means of atonement, he
sought to constrain them to answer by N uma's mysterious rites at
the altar of Jupiter Elicius: but an oversight in these perilous con­
jurations, or the wrath of the gods, drew down a thunderbolt upon
him. The lightning consumed the king's corpse, and his house,

876 Varro Rer. Human. vm. in Festus v. Septimontio.

77 Septies rebellarunt, he says, v. 4.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 269

together with all his family. A reign of two and thirty years was
assigned to him.
The lay of Tullus Hostilius is followed by the narration of a
course of events, without any marvellous circumstances, or poetical
colouring: by the founding of Ostia this narrative is connected
with real history: but it is referred to a chronological computation
in which the tricks of elaborate falsifiers are most clearly apparent.
Ancus Marcius, from whom the plebeian house of the Marcii
boasted of descending, was called in the tradition the son of Nu ma's
daughter; which alludea to the practice of taking the kings alter­
nately from the Romans and the Quirites. Mindful of his an·
cestor's example· he applied himself to the re-establishment of re­
ligion, which had fallen into neglect. He had the ceremonial law,
so far as it required to be generally known, transcribed upon tables,
which were fixed up in public that all might read them: and in­
deed it may easily be believed to have not been until after the time
of the kings that the indispensable observances of religion were
converted by the pontiffs into a mystery only to be learnt from
their teaching. , .
The reign of Ancus however was not destined to be so peaceful.
as that of Numa. He conducted the war against the Latins victo·
riously. He took Politorium, Tellena, Ficana, towns lying be·
tween Rome' and the sea, the Via Ostiensis and the Ardeatina, and
compelled their inhabitants to settle upon the Aventine. At length
being alarmed by the aanger of Medullia, a confederate army assem­
bled, over which the king gained a hard-fought victory; whereupon,
as the tradition says, he carried ·away several thousand Latins to
Rome. He also made conquests from Veii, and acquired some
forests on the sea coast and sorrie saltmarshes, as well as both banks
of the Tiber down to its mouth; here he buill Ostia, the oldest of
the Roman colonies which the historical age recognized as having
been preserved ; for those founded by Romulus, Fidenre, Crus­
tumerium, and Medullia, effaced this character .by their rebellion.
Ostia, which like them enjoyed the Crerite franchise, '?'as the
harbour of Rome: ships of considerable size could in those days
run into the Tiber; the mouth of whiCh, partly through neglect,
and partly from ill judged erections, has now become inaccessible,
even more so than those 'of the other rivers that discharge into the
Mediterranean. He built the first bridge over the Tiber, and a
fort beyond it on the J aniculum as a bulwark against Etruria: on
the other side he dug the ditch of the Quirites, a protection of
eonsiderable importance, as Livy says, for such parts of the city as
270 HISTORY OF ROME.

stood low and were exposed. This ditch, a work of no splendour

and not mentioned by :my other writer, must without doubt be the
Martana, a continuation of the Fossa Cluilia, which originally
perhaps had been conducted into one of the little rivers that fall into
the Tiber below Rome. It was a defence for the. open ground
between the Crelian and the Palatine 8 78 ; and it drained the valley
of the Murcia, while it supplied the Campagna with water. The
oldest remaining monument of Rome, the prison, formed out of a
stone-quarry in the Capitoline hill, is also called the work of Ancus.
It was on the side of the hill above the Forum, the place ·of assem­
bly for the plebeians; and, until an equality of laws was introduced,
it served only to keep the_ plebeians, and those who were below
them, in custody: hence the construction of it may be ascribed to
the same king to whom the first establishment of the plebeian estate
is referred. The original common law of the plebs was regarded
as the fruit of his .legislation; in the same manner as the rights of
the three ancient tribes were looked upon to be the laws of the
first three kings7 9 : and because all landed property by the principles
of the Roman law proceeded from the state, and on the incorpora­
tion of new communities was surrendered by them, and conferred
back on them by the state, the assignment of public lands is attri­
buted to Ancus 80 • Now this act being viewed as a parcelling out of
public territories, was probably the cause which led the plebeians
to bestow the epithet of good upon him in the old poems: as on the
other hand it must have been the same act that induced Virgil to
charge him with vanity and courting popular favours 1•. They who
look with aversion on the beneficent and kingly work of fostering
the germs of new rights and cherishing them as they spring up,
seek for the source of such conduct, not in that generosity of mind
which, while it respects the rights of whatever has any living
energy, rejoices in the coming forth of new life, and shrinks from
the sight of torpor and decay, but in impure motives, which, it is
true, may give birth to actions not dissimilar in appearance.
The ground about the temple of Murcia, bet.ween the Circus and
the Aventine, cannot have afforded more than scanty room for a few
hundred small houses, and can never have been sufficient for the

878 The Vicus of Septem Vire.

79 See note 763. ' 80 Cicero de Re. p. n. 18.
81 Bonus Ancus. Ennius 111. p. 53. Lucretius m. 1038. Zonaras too
says: iir1w<il' .,·,. In Virgil on the' contrary he is Jactantior Ancus .Nu~
q1t0que jam nimium gaudens popularibus auris.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 271

many thousand families that Livy speaks of 8 "~: but the Annals may
perhaps have been justified in stating that even thus early a very
large number of free Latins were incorporated with the Roman
Btate. Perhaps however this was not effected by conquest, ~ut by
a voluntary treaty; if we suppose that after the destruction of Alba
an agreement was entered into by Rome and Latium, that a part of
the Albensian and a part of the Priscan Latin towns should belong
to Rome, while a new statz, consisting like the old one of thirty
towns, was formed out of the rest. For a similar arrangement was
entered into by these states on two several occasions during the
historical age.
The new subjects could not be admitted into a new tribe, as the
Luceres had been : for by the reception of these the number of tribes
had been completed, and it could not be exceeded: they constituted
a community which stood side by side with the people formed by
the members of the thirty curies, as the body of the Latin towns
had stood in relation to Alba. This was the beginning of the plebs,
which was the strength and the life of Rome; the people of Ancus
0
as distinguished from that of Romulus 88 • And this is a fresh reason
for Ancus being placed in the middle of the Roman kings. ·

882 I. 33. Multis millibus Latinorum in civitatem acceptis, quibus, ut

jungeretur Palatio Aventinus, ad Murcire datre sedes.
83 The words ip. the concluding strophe of the hymn of Catullus, xxuv,
Sis quocumque tibi placet Sancta nomine, Romulique .!lnr:ique, ut solita es,
bona Sospites ope gentem, answer to the formulary, Quod felix faustum for­
tunatumque sit populo plebique Romana. It was Scaliger's piercing eye that
detected the true reading in this passage, from finding that the text, before the
editors had disfigured it, was antique; out of which the superficial, always
easily satisfied, had made antiquam, the reading adopted by his predecessors.
The light which led him seems to have been that of grammatical logic, which
taught him that, to complete~the sense of the passage, another conjunction
was wanting after Romulique: at least I do not know of any trace of his hav­
ever set himself to solve the riddle of Roman history. But there was no re­
gion of philological research that he had left unvisited; and that which is
frequently the case may perhaps in this instance have befallen him: in a mass
of utter confusion, a, single spot which others have overlooked, will often
strike an observing eye ; but no distinct consciousness of it is retained, be­
cause it is only an insulated fragment of a whole. It recurs to the memory,
when any thing e1se connected with it is any where met with: but even then
it is often only a transient light which falls upon the darkness; and even he
on whom it has shone forgets what is revealed to him.
 THE LAY OF L. TARQUINIUS PRISCUS

AND SERVIUS TULLIUS.

IT is impossible to believe that the ancient lays in their original

form spoke of Damaratus as the father of L. Tarquinius: but Poly­
bius must have found this story already extant in the Roman An·
nals*; and perhaps it ~lso occurred in Ennius ; nay even in the later
forms assumed by the old poem, when the tales of Zopyrus and
Periander were woven into it. Such lays, even in .the hands of
learned bard,i, are perpetually altering their features, shifting and
changing until they vanish away.
When Cypselus, the offspring of a marriage of disparagement,
uniting with the commons had overthrown the oligarchy at Corinth,
and was taking vengeance on the persons who had aimed at his life,
many of the Bacchiads fled, and among the rest Damaratus. Com·
merce had not been esteemed disreputable among the Corinthian
nobility; as a merchant, Damaratus had formed ties of friendship at
Tarquinii; he settled there. He brought great wealth with him ;
the sculptors Euchir and Eugrammus, and Cleophantus the paint­
er8841 accompanied him; and along with the fine arts of Greece he
taught the Etrusc~ns alphabetical writingss. Renouncing his native
country for ever, he took an Etruscan wife, and to the sons whom
she bare him, gave the names and education of their own land,
together with the refinements of Greece. One story represents him
as having obtained the government of Tarq uinii• 6 : but there is more
accordance with the customs aml laws of Etruria in the other, that
his son Luc~mo, having by his elder brother's early death become
sole heir of his father'.s riches, and being encouraged by his wife
Tanaquil who was initiated in the national art of reading futurity,
resolved on emigrating to Rome, because every prospect to honours

* Po!yb. v1. 2. 884 Pliny xxxv. 5. 43.

85 Tacitus. Annal. 11. 14. 66 Strabo vm. p. 378. c.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 273

was closed against strangers among the Etruscans. Her expecta­

tions were confirmed by an augury. When they were looking from
the top of the Janiculum upon the Roman hills before them, the
traveller's bonnet was carried away by an eagle into the air; but
soon he stopped again with it and replaced it on the head he had
bared. At Rome Lucumo was welcome: being admitted with his
family to the rights of citizenship, he changed his name into Lucius
Tarquinius, to which Livy adds Priscus. His courage, the splen­
dour with which he lived, his liberality and prudence, gained him
the favour of the king and the people: the former appointed him
guardian to his sons; and when the throne became vacant the
senate and citizens raised him to it with one accord.
Of the wars ascribed to L. Tarquinius, Dionysius, adopting the
forgeries of very recent annalists, has given an intolerable newspa­
per account: for the purposes of this work even Livy's dignified
brevity goes too much into detail; and it would be utterly at vari­
ance with them, to stop and point out how the two historians con­
tradict each other as to the order of these wars and their events.
According to Livy it was by the Latins and Sabines that the grow­
ing power of Rome was obstinately but unsuccessfully resisted.
Apiohe, a town destroyed by Tarquinius, belonged to the Latins;
and its wealth was such, that the booty enabled him to ex~1ibit more
splendid games than the city had yet seen: Corniculum too was
demolished ; and N omen tum, 'together with Ameriola, Cameria,
Crustumerium, Ficulea, l\ledullia, places which must have lain be­
tween Nomentum, Tusculum, and the walls of Rome 88 7, submitted
to the dominion of the Romans. One or two of these towns are
never again mentioned afterward. The Sabines had advanced with
a great force to the gates of Rome: the Roman horse drova them
back: their camp was -011 the left bank of the Anio; Tarquinius set
fire to their bridge by means of burning rafts, and annihilated their
whole army. Several traditions are connected with this war; the
vow of the Capitol, and the institution of ornaments for boys of
noble birth: the king's son, a lad of fourteen, was in tested by him
with a golden bulla and a purple-bordered robe, for having slain one
of the foe.
The war in which the lEquians, who in aftartimes became the
indefatigable enemies of Rome, and were already a great and for­

887 It is hard to understand how the Romans and Sabines could come in
hostile contact, so long as these cities continued independent and inte~ven<'d
between them.
1.-KK
 274 HISTORY OF ROME.
midable people 888 , were subdued by Tarquinius, is referred by Livy
to the second king of that narne 89 • Dionysius says nothing of this
quarrel: but on the other hand he relates minutely, how at first
five of the remoter great Etruscan cities were induced to send aid,
which proved inadequate, to the Latins; and how afterward, when
the Sabines had entered into a truce for several years, all the twelve
cities to the south of the Apennines united their forces against Rome,
but after losing a battle at Eretum submitted to king Tarquinius as
their supreme head, and did homage to him by presenting him
with the badges of royalty, the splendour of which ennobled his
triumph9°: according to this account, in the evening of his days he
was the rcknowledged sovereign of the Etruscans, the Latins, and
the Sabines. With regard to this vast extent of his dominions
nothing is said by Cicero- or by Livy; the only extant Latin writer
who speaks of it, is Florus: but· thus much is recognized by all,
that the power of Rome under Priscus rose far above what it had
ever been before.
His victory in the Sabine war was owing to his having doubled
the number of his cavalry: in conformity with this measure, the
king wished to double the number of the equestrian centuries, and
to name the three new ones after himself and two of his friends.
His plan was opposed by the augur Attus Navius; who represented
that Romulus had acted under the guidance of the auspices in regu­
lating the distribution of the knights, and that nothing but the con­
. sent of the auspices could warrant a change- in it. Attus by descent
was a Sabine; the gift of observing and interpreting auguries was
the endowment of his countrymen; even when a boy without any
instruction he had practised the art, and afterward on being taught
had acquired the greatest knowledge of it that any priest ever at­
tained to 91 • In all probability the books which we read, word his
888 Cicero de Re p. n. 20. Strabo v. p. 231. a. • A1"wo1 /'fl'l"ov1uov7ec
µri.>.10-'1"11. T•ic Kuph<tw 7ou7111v 'l""c -.Z.6>.m T<tp1<uV1oc ITpio-"°' ite7r6p9nn. In
the same place he calls A piolre a V olscian town.
89 He treats it indeed as a matter of little importance: pacem cum lEquo·
rum gente fecit. r. 55.
90 This ceremony, like others, was adopted by Rome from the Etrus·
cans, whose monuments contain representations of triumphal processions.
91 Dionysius says, he did not belong to the college of augurs. This is
an inference which his ingenuity, or that of some one before him, drew, be~
cause the augurs were patricians, and Attus in his boyhood had tended his
father's swine; as if a poor patrician could have dispensed with the household
services of his children. lt is utterly inconceivable that the ancient legend
should have represented the most renowned of all augurs as a stranger to the
college.
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 275

objections less peremptorily than they were .worded in the original

legend: in which he probably declared that the auspices forbade
any change. Tarquinius, for the sake of shaming the augurs, or
· for his own satisfaction, as Crcesus put the veracity of the oracles
to the proof, commanded him to divine whether what he was at that
moment thinking of were possible or impossible. When Attus had
observed the heavens and declared that the object of the king's
thoughts was feasible, Tarquinius held out a whetstone, and a razor
to split it with: the augur straightway did so. The whetstone and
razor were preserved in the Comitium under an altar: beside them
on the steps of the senate-house stood the statue of Attus, a priest
with his head muffied.
Yielding to this omen, the king abandoned the scheme of estab­
lishing any new centuries ; but to each of those established by
Romulus he associated a second under the same name ; so that
from this time forward there were the first and second Ramnes,
.Tities, and Luceres. The writers who state that the equestrian
order was increased to twelve hundred, take a century for a hun­
dred horsemen, and suppose that the six centuries were further
doubled by the same king after the JEquian wars9~.: the fact they
refer to however was nothing but the union with an equal number
of Latin cavalry in the field, like that between the infantry of the
two nations.
What has made the name of Tarquinius ever memorable, is,
that with him begins the greatness and the splendour of the city.
Often the legends' fluctuate in ascribing a work or an exploit to
him or to his son: e but the vaulted sewers by which the Velabrum,
the Forums, the country down to the lower Subura, and the valley
of the Circus, till then swamps and lakes, or bays in the bed of the
river, were drained, are in mo.st of them called the work of the
elder king; and coupled with this undertaking must have been that
of embanking the Tiber. In the valley thus gained between the
ancient town of Roma and the Tarpeian hill, he allotted a spaet}

892 This throws light on a very obscure passage of Cicero de Re p. 11. 20.
Prioribu"s equitum partibus secundis additis, M ac cc fecit equitcs, numerum­
que duplicavit postquam bello lEquos subegit. Livy has misunderstood the
fact: yet in him too the true reading is 1200, not 1800 : see Mai on the pas­
sage of Cicero. For there is little difference between d and a, especially in
the uncial character of which a specimen is given in the plate to my edition
of Cicero's fragments, n. 3; and they would be perpetually mistaken for
each other, but that d is a consonant. nidccc in the Florentine manuscript
comes from 11taccc (Mac cc) as it stanrls in Ci<;ero.
276 HISTORY OF ROME.

for a market and for the meetings of the people, built porticoes
round it, and gave ground to such as wished to set up booths and
shops there. Betwixt the Palatine and the Aventine, the meadow
redeemed from the water was levelled, and converted into a race­
course: each of the curies had a place here assigned to it, where
the senators and knights erected scaffolds to view the games
from" 98 , and where they would also make room for their clients.
He surrounded the city with a wall of hewn stone after the Etrus­
can manner, or at least made preparations for doing so 9 \ The
building of the Capitoline temple from the very foundation is
ascribed by the earlier narratives to the last king; to the father they
only attribute the vow. And so must every one do, who wishes
for connexion or fancies he sees history in lays and legends ; else
the building would have rested for a number of years during the
whole reign of Servius Tullius.
These works, rivalling the greatest of the Etruscan, can never
have been accomplished without oppressive task work, any more
than those of the Pharaohs or Solomon's. To cheer his people
during their hard service, the king instituted games; which from
his time forward were celebrated annually in September, under the
name of the Roman or great games. Of the contests which drew
the Greeks to Olympia, none but the <lhariot race and boxing were
practised by the Etruscans. The spectacle was a source of delight
to the people of Italy; but the contests were the business of hire­
lings or slaves : if a freeman engaged in. them, instead of being
im~ortalized by sculpture or in song, and of becoming the pride of
his family, he forfeited his honour and his franchise. The cha­
rioteer and the player were in no higher esteem than the gladiator.
Not that the Romans clung to their spectacles of all kinds with
less vehemence of pleasure than the Greeks: if however, like the
Greeks, they could have honoured the object that excited their pas­
sions, they would not have lost themselves in that extravagant fury,
which even in earlier times maddened the factions of the circus in
behalf of their despicable favourites. But the chariot race was not
the only amusement at the Circensia: there were also the proces­
sions, the images of the gods borne along robed in kingly garments,

803 Loca. divisa patribus equitibusque, says Livy 1. 35 : J'm,fllv To~' 'l'O?rou'
,;, <rp11i.1t.ov'l'11. <j>pa'.<rp11.~, i1t<r'.<l'<r~ <j>pa:rp<f- p.o'ip"'
.i,..£J""'" p.£11.r. Dionysius 1n.
68. They are both relating the same thing.'
94 Dionysius, m. 67, says icfo1tlp.1t<l'I" Livy 1. 38, parat. The tradition,
we may be sure, was not thus cautious: the reason which ma.de the histo­
rians so, is clear enough : the wall of Servius.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 277

the armed boys, the war dances and the ludicrous imitations of
them*. The rites of religion too, which till then h;i.d been plain
and simple, were clothed with splendour under Tarquiniu~: in his
reign bloody sacrifices are said to have been introduced, and adora­
tion to have been first paid to representations of the gods under
human forms.
The memory of this king was honoured and celebrated by the
descendants of those who had sighed under his heavy yoke: nay
the sufferings themselves were imputed to his detested son; although
neither the Forum nor the Circus can have been laid out, until the
great sewers had been built. Still more favour was shown by after
ages to Caia Crecilia, the wife whom another legend gives him in­
stead of the Etruscan Tanaquil: the Roman brides reverenced her
as a benificent enchantress 895 , and an industrious housewife diligent
at the looms 6, just as the blessed days of Queen Bertha and her
spinning wheel are still held in remembrance among the Germans.
According to. the tables of the pontiffs Tarquinius had reigned
thirty-eight years, when his glorious life was terminated by assas­
sination. The sons of Ancus l\Iarcius had· long looked upon him
as an enemy and usurper, whose death would afford them an oppor­
tunity of mounting the throne. They were' not quieted by seeing
that the king was more than eighty years old : for there was no
doubt that, if the approach of death found him in possession of his
consciousness, he would secure the succession to his son-in-law
Servius Tullius, his own favourite, and the darling of the whole
people. In those days princes still acted as judges, especially in
breaches of the peace, for any of their subjects who had recourse
to their paternal authority. Under a pretext of this kind two mur­
derers engaged by the l\Iarcii obtained an entrance into the king's
chamber, and gave him a deadly wound.
The birth of Servius Tullius was no less marvellous than humble.
Ocrisia, a handmaid of the queen, and one of the captives taken at
Corniculum, was bringing some cakes as an offering to the house­
hold genius, when she saw an apparition of the god in the fire on
the hearth: Tanaquil commanded her to array herself as a bride
and shut herself ~p in the chapel. She became pregnant by a god:

* Dionysius vu. 72.

895 She wore a. magic girdle : hence persons in great peril took filings
from the girdle of her statue in the temple of Sancus. Festus v. Prredia.
96 Probus de nominibus p.1400. in Gothofred. Anet. Ling. Lat. Plutarch,
Qurest. Rom. xxx. p. 271, makes her wife to a son ofTarquinius.
 278 IIISTORY OF RO.ME.

by many of the Romans the household genius was said to be the

father of Servius; by others Vulcan. The former supported their
opinion by the festival Servius established in honour of the Lares :
the latter by the deliverance which the god of fire vouchsafed to
his statue89 7.
Such legends are always far older than those which have a histo­
rical air: of the latter kind two very different ones became current
on the descent of Servius. According to the oneus, his mother
was a handmaid from Tarquinii, his father one of the king's clients,
he himself when a child in the condition of a slave. The other had
a more dignified air, and was caught at by Dionysius: it stated that
at Corniculum, one of the .Latin towns to the north of the Anio,
dwelt a person of princely birth, who likewise bore the name of
Servius Tullius: that at the taking of his native city he was slain
along with all its defenders: but that his widow.- then far advanced in
her pregnancy, was carried away with the other captives to Rome;
where she was assigned to the queen on account of her illustrious
rank, was treated with honour, and was delivered of a boy.
One day, as the child was sleeping in the porch of the royal
palace, his head to the horror of the beholders was seen encircled
with flames9 9 , The queen Tanaquil forbade their being extin­
guished : for the Etruscan prophetess recognized the spirit of his
father, and foresaw that the boy was called to great things : wlien
he awoke the apparition had vanished. From that tim11 forward he
was bred up like the king's own child, 'and to the highest hopes.
Nor in more advanced life did he ever cea:>e to be in intimate com­
munion with the higher p 0 wers. The goddess Fortune loved him:
she compressed within his life the extremes of herrempire, birth in
the form of a servant, the possession of sovereign power with wor­
thiness to wield it; and finally an unmerited cruel death: she visited
him secretly as his spouse 900 , but under the condition that he should
cover his face and never look upon her. A very ancient gilt wooden
statue of the king, the face of which was kept covered over in like
manner,-was set up in the temple he had erected to his goddess.

8D7 Ovid. Fast. vr. 625. ff. Dionysius Iv. 2.

98 In Cicero de Rep. n. 21. The insinuation that Servius was probably
a bastard of the king, is an instance how even the greatest mind may be be­
trayed into a silly absurdity. ·
9D According to Valerius Antias this happened late in his life, when he
had fallen asleep after sorrowing long for the death of his wife Gegania. Plu­
tarch de Fort. Roman. p. 323. c. ' This Gcgania instead of Tarquinia, and
Crecilia instead ofTanaquil, may possibly be historical personages.
900 Ovid. Fast. v1. 577. ff.
 HISTORY OF lWi\l'E. 279

The temple was once consumed by fire; but the statue remained
.uninjured, because Servius was sprung out of the flames.
In his early years the city and army found him the bravest and
the best of the Roman youth: a battle had been almost lost; he
tossed the standard into the midst of the enemy's ranks, .and thus
inspirited his soldiers to gain the victory: he headed the armies of
the aged l•ing with glory, and was rewarded with the hand of his
daughter. His father-in-law entrusted him with the exercise of the
government; and when Tarquinius became very old, Servius was
enabled to lighten the yoke that pressed on his subjects. So that
they rejoiced, when, by an artifice frequently practised in the East,
it was announced to them that the king's wound was not danger­
ous ; and that for the present he appointed Servius to govern in his
stead. Had an interreign taken place, the senate would have had
the power of keeping the election of Servius from coming to the
vote: as it was, he exercised the authority of king, without any
election: however, when the death of Tarquinius became known,
the curies invested him with the imperium9° 1; and afterward he
did homage, for the first time, to the majesty of the centuries, by
calling upon them too to decide whether he was to reign over them.
The wars of this king are far the least important part of his ac­
tions: a successful one against the Veientines, of which Livy makes
only slight mention, is magnified by Dionysius into victories over
the whole Etruscan nation, which after the death of Tarquinius
had repented of its submission, but was compelled by severe defeats
to resort to it a second time as the only means of safety. Indeed
the forgery has made way even into the Fasti, where the pretended
triumphs are recorded with the year and day of their occurrence;
In the older traditions Servi us, next to Numa, seems to have had·
the scantiest portion of military fame: his great deeds were laws;
and he was named by posterity, says Livy, as the author of all
their civil rights and institutions, by the side of Numa, the author
of their religious worship. The constitution attributed to ~im re•
quires an explanation that must be kept apart and removed without
the circle of these legends : but the lays which preserved his
memory in freshness, must assuredly have also celebrated his pay·
ing the debts of such as were reduced to poverty, out of his royal
treasures; his redeeming those who hau pledged their labour for
what they borrowed; and his assigning allotments of land, to the
free plebeian citizens, out of the territories they had won for their
common country with their blood,

901 Cicero de Re p. 11. 21. Dionysius 1v. 12.

280 HISTORY OF ROME.
Several Latin communities, thei1· towns having been destroyed,
or continuing to exist only as market places, were at this time a
component part of the Roman people, which had already grown
into a nation: and this nation was leagued by treaty, but not by a
federal union, with the Latins who held their general assemblies at
the fountain of Ferentina. Such a federal union was effected by
Servi us, who at the same time obtained the supremacy in it. All
such federations among the ancients were connected with the wor­
ship at some common temple: the sun and moon, Di anus and
Diana, were the divinities adored by the Latins, as the mightiest,
the most manifest, and the most benevolent. Accordingly when
Servius concluded a league between Ron;e and the thirty towns of
the Latins, among which Tusculum, Gabii, Pneneste, Tibur, Aricia,
Ardea, were at that time the most important, the confederates com­
bined in raising a temple to Diana on the Aventine, the principal
abode of such Latins as had newly become citizens of Rome. The
tablet containing the record of the league, and enumerating every
people that took a part in it, was erected and preserved th~re : and
perhaps it was because this temple was the common property of
Rome and Latiurn, that the Aventine was not included within the
pomcerium.; neither when Servius extended it by incorporating the
Esquiline and the Viminal, nor in subsequent enlargements 90 ~.
The Sabines too joined in the worship of this temple 3 • A yeo·
man of that people had a bull of prodigious size born among his
cattle, the enormous horns of which were preserved down to very
late times, nailed up in the vestibule : the soothsayers announced
that whoever should sacrifice this bull to the Diana of the Aven­
tine, would -raise his country to rule over her confederates. The
Sabine had already driven the victim before the altar, when the
Roman priest craftily rebuked him for daring to offer it up with
unclean hands: while he went and washed in the Tiber, the Ro­
man accomplished the sacrifice.
The legend relates that the king's beneficent and wise laws were
·received by the patricians with sullenness and anger ; and its voice
may well be believed ; for of their descendants but a very few were
inspired with the wisdom of king Theopompus, who comforted his
repining queen by telling her, that limited power is the more lasting.
Strong houses belonging to the nobles in strong situations within

!J02 Gellius xm. 14.

3 In this way one may get over the difficulty which that acute critic 1
G!areanus, perceived in Livy 1. 45.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 281

the city excited alarm in ancient Rome, as they did in the Italian
towns during the middle ages : thus the people looked with jea·
lousy on the house that the consul Valerius was building; and thus
the Tuscans are said to have been commanded to descend from the
Crelian hill*. In the same spirit it is related, that, when Servius
was building on the Esquiline, and took up his own residence on
that mount, he would not allow the patricians to fix there ; just as
they were afterward prohibited from dwelling on the Capitoline:
but he assigned the valley to them, where they settled and formed
the Vicus Patricius 904 ; in the neighbourhood of Santa Pudenziana.
His suspicion was not unwarranted: thus much may be considered
as historical, that they conspired with a heinous rebel against the
venerable king.
The royal house of Rome, says Livy, was doomed, like others,
to be defiled by tragical horrors. The two brothers, Lucius and
Aruns, the sons of Tarquinius Priscus, were marrie~ to the two
daughters of king Servius. Lucius, capable of crime, though his
own impulses were not strong enough to urge him to it, was united
to a virtuous lady; Aruns, honest and sincere, to a wife of a fiend­
ish character. Enraged at the long life of her aged father, and at
the apathy of her husband, who seemed ready, when the throne
· became vacant, to resign it to his ambitious brother, she swore de­
struction to them both. She seduced Lucius to join her in bringing
about the death of his brother, and of her own sister: without even
the bare show of mourning, they lit their marriage torch at the fu.
neral pile: Tanaquil lived to endure this sorro'f. 5 It seemed
however as if the criminals were 011 the point of losing the object
of their crime: for Servius, to complete his legislation, entertained
the thought of resigning the crown, and establishing the consular
form of government. 6 Nor were· the patricians less alarmed and
indignant at this plan: for they saw that the hateful laws of Ser­
vius would be confirmed forever, if consuls were to be appointed
after the manner proposed in the king's commentaries. When the
conspiracy was ripe, Tarquinius appeared in the senate with the
badges of royalty, and was greeted by ~he insurgents as prince. On

* Vaxro de I. I. 1v. p. 14. 904 Festus v. Patric!tis Vicus.

5 According to Fabius: see Dionysius iv. 30; where he vehemently
finds fault with Fabius on this score, because according to the Annals Aruns
died in the fortieth yeax of Servi us.
6 Livy 1. 48. 60. Dionysius 1v. 40. In Plutaxch, de Fort. Roman. p.
323. d, Ocrisia or Tanaquil exacts an oath from him not to do so: that is, she
foresaw Tullia's crime.
J.-LL
282 HISTORY OF ROME.

the report of a seditious commotion, the king hastened undaunted

to the senate-house, and standing in the doorway reprimanded Tar­
quinius as a traitor: the latter seized the weak old man, and threw
him down the stone steps. Bleeding and maimed Servius was lifted
up by some trusty attendants and led away; but before he reached
his dwelling, the tyrant's servants came up with him and murdered
him: his body was left lying in its blood.
Meanwhile,Tullia could not await.the tidings of the result. She
drove through the midst of the crowd .to the senate-house, and hailed
her husband king: her transports struck even him with horror; he
commanded her to return home. In a street, which from that time
forward bore the nam!) of Wicked, the body of her father was lying
before .her. The mules shrank back; her servant pulled in the
reins; she ordered him to drive on over. the corpse: the blood
spirted over the carriage and on her dress.
According to another legend which Ovid has worked up 90 7, the
insurrection of Tarquinius excited a fray between his partisans and
those who remained faithful to the king; in which Servius, while
flying homeward, was slain at the foot of the Esquiline: hence the
bloody corpse was lying before the carriage, when Tullia drove to
take possession of the palace.
Once she ventured to enter the temple of Fortune, where the
honoured statue of her father was erected: the statue hid its face
from the looks of the parricide •
The people, stunned and dismayed, suffered the chains that had
been loosened to be fastened upon them again. But when in the
funeral procession the image of Servius was borne behind his bier
in the pomp of royalty, every virtuous and every fierce passion was
kindled by .the beloved features thus restored to their sight: an in­
surrection would have burst forth immediately; vengeance would
have been taken: but so unstable and thoughtless is the populace,
its rage was appeased when the face was covered overs. Yet the
memory of Servi us continued to live very long; and si_nce the peo­
ple celebrated his birth day on the nones of every month-for the
month had become a matter of uncertainty, but that he was born on

907 Ovid Fast. v1. 598. 8 Ovid Fast. v1. 613.

9 Ovid Fast. v1. 581. Another legend followed by Livy related exactly
the contrary; that Tarquiniils forbade the burial ·Of the corpse, aaying in
mockery, Romulus too went witlurut funeral rites; and that for this reason the
name of Superbus was given him. They who, like Dionysius, thought such
conduct too unmannerly, devised a way of giving Serviu11, not indeed a burial
suitable to his rank, but at all events a private one.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 283
the nones of some month was agreed by every tradition,-and as
their veneration grew stronger and stronger, when the patricians,
having become sole masters of the government under the consular
form, were pressing hard upon the commonalty, the senate at length
found it necessary to enact that the markets should never be held
on the nones, lest the countryfolk being gathered together, and in­
flamed by present oppression, and by the remembrance of better
times, should venture upon an insurrection, to restore the laws of
the martyr. 91 ~
910 Macrobius Saturnalia. 1, 13.
 EXAMINATION OF THE ·STORIES OF L.
TARQUINIUS AND SERVIUS TULLIUS.

THE story of Damaratus acquires a seductive look of historical

truth, from the positive manner in which it is connected with Cyp­
selus, whereby it appears at the same time to confirm the chrono­
logical statements with regard to L. Tarquinius. Now could it be
assumed that the story was transplanted in this shape out of native
traditions into the earliest annals, its importance would only be in­
creased by the gross ignorance as to the affairs of Greece displayed
by the annalists even so late as in the seventh century of the city,
and by their manifest incompetence for devising that the tables of
the pontiffs should synchronize with the history of Corinth. Did
they not even consider Dionysius a contemporary of Coriolanus ?
did they not fancy, running off into the opposite error, that in the
year 323 the Carthaginian armies crossed over into Sicily for the
first time9 11 ?
But this apparent chronological coincidence stands and falls with
the dates assigned to L. Tarquinius: and the only foundation for
these is a piece of numerical trifling. In the bare empty outline,
which is clearly an invention, there may seem to be such an agree­
ment: but the old Roman story was enormously at variance with
those dates; ancL there is no possibility of a reconcilement: what
looks like one has only been effected by glossing over some things
and distorting others.
All the Roman annalists, with the exception 'of Piso who adul­
terated what he found, followed Fabius in calling the last king and
his brother Aruns the sons of the elder Tarquinius, who died during
their childhood; and this account was adopted by Cicero and Livy:

911 For the former point, see Dionysius vu. 1: for the latter, Livy 1v. 29;
who repeats the statement without a scruple. There is a singular misunder­
standing here, which I will explain in the second volume.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 285

Fabius said no less expressly, that they were the sons of Tanaquil,
and that she outlived Aruns. This harmonizes exceedingly well
with our finding that Collatinus and L. Brutus, the former of whom
is described as the grandson to the brother of the elder Tarquinius,
the latter as the son of that king's daughter, are of the same age
with the sons of Tarquinius Superbus : and this strikes so deep
into the very heart of the story, that the refinements of Piso and
Dionysius destroy all manner of connexion in it, and entail the
necssity of still more falsifications than they themselves had any
notion of, in order to restore even a scantling of sense and unity.
It was the easiest of all possible historical controversies, to shame
old Fabius by calculating that Tarquinius, if, as the Annals gave
out, he came to Rome at latest in the eighth year of Ancus, must at
least have reached his eightieth year when he was murdered, and
that Tanaquil cannot then have been under her seventy-fifth ; so
his having left children of tender age behind him was out of the
question; and moreover that, if Aruns died in the fortieth year of
Servius, his mother must then have been a hundred and fifteen years
old. With Fabi~s indeed Dionysius might argue on the premises
of the chronology admitted by both: but the old poet would have
replied to him: My good friend! who told you that I count like
the pontiffs? ·Were I to reckon a period of eighty-two years for
the two reigns of Tarquinius and Servius, and to trouble myself
about what the Annals say concerning the year when the Lucumo
came to Rome and that when Aruns died, then you would be in the
right: but those nonsensical numbers no way affect me. If you
insist on my saying how many years then I would allow to these
two kings, and if I must needs give you an answer; why...five and
twenty, thirty 91 ~ ••• what know I about it? what care I? Only it
must not be a number that ruins my poem, and makes Tullia and
Tarquinius wait twenty long years from the hour when they must
have conceived the plot of their crime, before they carry it into
effect: it must not be a number that makes the father of Collatinus
come into the world above a hundred and twenty years before the
day of his son's idle talk with the royal youths over their cups; or

912 Whoever wishes to form a notion as to the probable mean duration of

a magistracy resembling the Roman monarchy, may acquire it from the cata­
logues of the Venetian doges, during that period when the election did not
fall of set purpose on old men, but on persons fit to govern and to command
the armies of the state.· Durin<>' the five centuries between 805 and 1311,
there were forty doges; so that h~elve years and a half fall to the share ofeach.
Besides at the beginning the office was in fact hereditary.
286 HISTORY OF ROME.
the mother of Brutus more than a century before he drove out the
Tarquins, after having been living with the young princes as their
comrade.
But as soon as the birth of the first Tarquinius is placed at least
fifty years later, Damaratus ceases to be the contemporary of Cyp·
selus ; and down comes the whole story which was fabricated out
of this coincidence by some Greek learned in chronology. Such
invention3 may have travelled to Rome as early as in the time of
Fabius, since the father of Roman history did not write till after the
death of Eratosthenes.
Here again 1 will not refuse to try if I can explain how the cur·
rent story arose. That story is very far from the same thing with
a certain ancient Grreco-ltalian tradition, that Etruria had received
alphabetical writing and the arts from Greece. The tale of Dama·
ratus personified the bearers: nobody surely will place the sculptors
Euchir and Eugrammus, that is, the skilful handler of clay and the
good drawer upon it, as real personages in the history of the arts;
yet these names seem to belong to early times; not so that of Cleo·
phantus the painter, who was probably added afterward. Damara­
tus however is inseparable from his companion; and it is by no
means candid to lose sight of or slur over his being the introducer
of writing: which is only done, because it. is impossible to believe
that the art was not brought into Tyrrhenia until about the thirtieth
Olympiad.
What is related of him is an ancient tradition, just of the same kind
as that which makes Evander teach the art of writing to the Latins:
originally it was without any determinate date, and only repre·
sented the fact as belonging to that remote period when writing
was first diffused and the arts were in the germ; for Cleophantus
had no other colours than the red dust ground from tiles : so that
assuredly, had the notion become more distinct, the age of Dama·
ratus would hav,e been thrown back, like that Of Evander, far be­
yond the first Olympiad. As to Corinth being called his home, a
hint for explaining this might perhaps be derived from the resem·
blance noticed above between the earthen vases of Tarquinii and of
Corinth* ; which leads us to infer that there was some peculiar in·
tercourse between these two maritime cities : and perhaps some
Corinthian of the same name did actually at one time or other
reside in Etruria, and gain celebrity; which became still greater
from his name being given by the f~ble. to that ancient teacher of

* P. 100.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 287

Tyrrhenia. Having thus become generally known, like Pytha­

goras, the Roman legend connected Tarquinius with him, as it did
Numa and the .lEmilii with that philosopher; and from the Roman
chronology it was concluded that he must have been contemporary
with Cypselus, and so might be a fugitive Bacchiad. The cause
which moved him to leave his country, is cleverly devised, and so
is the story how he won general popularity: for it was necessary
to account for a foreigner being freely chosen king.
Now should any person c..onceive that the historical features of
this story are to be detected behind the legendary mask, and that
Tarquinius may have been a Tyrrhenian, born of an Etruscan wo­
man in a marriage of disparagement, he might urge, among other
arguments, his having introduced Greek rites and representations of
the gods into the Roman temples. For my own part I hazard a
very different conjecture, though one in this point nearly allied to
that which has just been suggested; a conjecture which may per­
haps startle even such as are not over-timid, more than any other
opinion at variance with the received one: yet in my eyes it has a
probability amounting to conviction.
The supposition that Tarquinius was an Etruscan owed its origin,
I conceive, solely to his name being deduced from that of the
Etruscan city; so that he was moreover deemed a suitable person
for the Tuscan age of Rome to be referred to. I am so far however
from regarding Tarquinii as the birth-place of his race, that I hold
it to .be of Latin origin.
The notion that the Tarquins were a family in our sense of the
word, is disproved by the fact, the evidence for which will be brought
forward by and by*, that a whole Tarquinian house existed at
Rome, which was banished along with the last king. We also find
mentioned of Tarquins at Laurentumeia: these may be supposed to
have been exiles of that house: but even if they were, to this place
'must the legend or tradition have made them turn their steps, as it
made Collatinus settle at Lavinium. When such a belief was cur­
rent, assuredly Tarquinii was not looked upon as their home.
The Latin origin of the Tarquins is pointed out by the surname
of the first king, just as the names of oth~r patricians showed from
what people they sprang1". For Priscus was certainly the name

* Note 1148. 913 Dionysius v. 54.

14 J.luruncus, Siculus, Tuscus, Sabinus. See above n. 7G5. Rutilus too
is Rutul,us; and among the Mamilii we find the names Turinus and Vitulus.
In like manner Priscus was a surname of several families: it is best known
as such in ancient times among the Servilii, and as the first surname of the
288 HISTORY OF ROME.
of a people just like Cascus*; and after the very same manner did
to
it grow mean primitive and oldfashioned: the Prisci Latini were
the Prisci et Latini. The formulary for declaring war, which
Livy has inserted under the reign of Ancus, is indeed any thing but
a document of that age : it is taken however from the books of pon­
tifical law, which extended into much remoter ages than the Annals,
and the writers of which, according to the times they lived in, were
observant of the circumstances and relations of antiquity. In these
books such an utter absurdity would never have been committed,
as to draw up a formulary declaring war against the old Latins, at
a time when Latin colonies had never been thought of: the expres­
sion is altogether unexceptionable, if used to denote the united .na­
tion of the Priscans and Latins 915 • Now the Servilii, among whom
Priscus was a surname, were among the Alban houses on the
Crelian; as were the Clmlii, who bore the surname of Siculus 16 :
for th,e Albans were conceived to be a mixture of the Siculians with
the Priscans. But as the Servilii being Priscans belonged to the
Luceres, so were the Tarquins the heatls and representatives of
that tribe. In this capacity they will appear in the course of the
history: for the present I will only remark that the father called up
the lesser houses to the senate, and that they were the faction which
supported the son in his insurrection 17. That one of the Luceres
should have become king, before his tribe was raised by his means
to the full rights of citizenship, is less surprising than if we sup­
pose him to have been a foreigner; and indeed by military influence
it may easily be explained j an infringement of privileges in such a
state of things being much more possible than under the consulate.
The Albans, although a mixed race, were mainly Tyrrhenians; and
this accounts for the worship of the Greek gods at the ludi Romani:
which, if Tarquinius was an Etruscan, is so inexplicable. Down
to this time the Sabine was the prevailing religion at Rome.

censor Marcus Porcius: who was born in the land of the Sabines, and came
from Latin ancestors. (Plutarch, Cato, c. 1.) In his case again it was mis­
understood, as if meant to distinguish him from his descendant: pris~i Cato­
nis virtus. The· name Priscus has exactly the same form and character with
the national names, Tuscus, Cascus, Opscus.
* Seep. 61.
915 Like populus Romanus Quiritcs. Livy 1. 32. Quarum rerum, &c.
condixit pater patratus populi Romoni Quiritium patri patrato Priscorum Lati­
norum, hominibusque Priscis Latinis, o/c. See above p. 224.
16 Livy 1. 30. Principes Albanorum in patres legit, Tullios, Servilios,
Quinctios, Geganios, Curiatios, Clrelios.
17 Livy 1. 47. Circumire et prensare minorum maxime gentium patres.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 28~

Caia Crocilia belongs to a legend concerning Tarquinius entirely

different from the prevalent one: for in the lattter Tanaquil comes
to Rome with him and outlives him; nor is any thing even said of
her having changed her Etruscan name like her husband. Croeilia
had a statue in a temple; so clearly is the tradition about her the
older: and her name implies a connexion with Prroneste, said to
have been built by Croculus 9 1", the heroic founder of her house. In
this point the fictitious Etruscan Tarquinius, the son of Damaratus,
has not quite obliterated the traces of the Latin Priscus: the histo­
rians threw aside altogether, what they could not reconcile with
their accounts. . · ·
Lucumo, as a name for an Etruscan, would have been just like
that of Patricius for a Roman. That no such ever occurred among
the Tuscans, is a matter on which the grave-stones, were it needed,
might serve as witnesses: the application of it in the legends of the
Romans to individuals, to the ally of Romulus, to the nobleman of
Clusium*, and to Tarquinius, is a proof how utterly uninformed
they were on every thing that concerned a nation in their imme­
diate neighbourhood, from their not understanding a word of its
language.
The greatest event in the story of Tarquinius Priscus, his sub·
duing the whole of Etruria south of the Apennines, is entirely past
over by Cicero and Livy; but the triumphal Fasti show that here
too Dionysius had Annals to bear him out; so th:.t the account they
gave must have been rejected as incredible by those Roman writers,
as no doubt it had been before the time of Cicero by Polybius.
In truth one may openly deny the historical character of a story
stating that the twelve Etruscan cities from Veii to Arretium, not
one of which is said even to have been besieged, much less taken, ·
should be led to submit to a master by the single battle at Eretum ;
and consequently of the account of the whole war, in spite of the
triumphal Fasti. At the same time this very union of Rome
with Etruria may chance to be one of the very few particles of his­
torical truth relating to those ages' 9 • But even if Rome was the
capital of a king who ruled over Etruria, with whom Tarquinius,
from his name, was identified, and if that king embellished it with
such works as could only be executed by the powers of a great
nation, who is there able to assure us that Rome conquered Etruria?

918 Servius on JEn. v~I. 681. * Dionysius n. 37. Livy v. 33.

19 Authors read by Strabo (v. p. 220. a.) also ~pake ofTarquinius Ill the
benefactor, and doubtle•• aa the ruler, of Etruria.
1.-!IBI
 290 HISTORY OF ROME.

that it was not a Tuscan who fixed his abode at Rome, in the cen­
tral point of Etruria, Latium, and the land of the Sabines?
The legend that Servi us Tullius was born in slavery, generally
adopted even by such as did not believe the story of his marvellous
conception, was probably occasioned by his name; or at least that
seemed to establish its truth. Now most of the explanations given
by the Romans themselves of their ordinary names, are to the full
as absurd as it would be to explain many among our own com­
monest names.by means of Teutonic roots: for the Roman are of
Sabine or some other foreign origin, as even Varro, the most ca­
pricious of all etymologers, allows. If however we are disposed
to accede to that which has a pl,ausible look, and so to adopt the
derivation given by Festus and Probus for the names .Manius and
Lucius, we may find an analogous and suitable meaning for ServiwJ
or Seruius; to wit, a child born in the evening, from sero, like
Manius from manes 2 o.
'Vhatever way.we regard him, the most remarkable of the Roman
kings, whose personal existence the history of the constitution
cannot refuse to recognize, is still in all the narratives of our hiB­
torians as much a mythological being as Romulus or Numa. We
look about for firm ground; and had nothing but those fictions been
handed down to us, I should not scruple to follow the track pointed
out by the relation between the king who preceded him .and the
lesser houses. The Tullii are mentioned among the Alban houses
by Livy: hence it would be probable that.Servius also belonged to
the Luceres: I would go further, and conjecture that he may have
been the offspring of a marriage unsanctioned by the state with a
Latin woman of Corniculum. But whatever weight may be attached
•to these probabilities, it requires more courage than does any other
conjecture in my work, to speak with confidence on this hPad.
For by a document, which itself has been preserved in an extra­
ordinary way, Servius is transported into a totally different region,
but is placed where we should never have looked for him.
The most credulous adherent to what commonly passes for a
history of the early ages of Rome, could not decline the challenge
to abide by the decision of Etruscan histories, if any strange good
chance were to supply us with such in an intelligible language.
For they must grant that the literature of Etruria was far older than
that of Rome ; and that the earliest Roman historian must have lived
920 The name of the Servilian house besides justifies us in conjecturing
without fear of going wrong that there was a hero named Servius in the Ro­
man '!1ythology. '
 HISTORY OF ROME. 291

a full century later than the time when the Etruscan annals were
composed, if these were written in the eighth secle of their nation*.
Now we <lo find an account of what these annals related about Ser­
vius, in the fragments of a speech made by the emperor Claudius
concerning the admission of some Lug<lunensian Gauls into the
senate: which fragments are preserved on two tables discovered at
J,yons in the sixteenth century 9~1, and since the time of Lipsius have
been often printed among the notes o~ Tacitus, but probably have
seldom met with a reader. And on this point the author of the
Tyrrhenian history is unquestionably a trustworthy witness.
Claudius begins to recount from the origin of the city how often
the form of government had been changed, and how even the royal
dignity had been bestowed upon foreigners. Then he says of
Servius Tullius: according to our annals he was the son of the
captive Ocresia: but if we follow the Tuscans, he was the faithful
follower of Creles Vivenna 22 , and shared in all his fortunes. At
last, being overpowered through a variety of disasters, he quitted
Etruria with the remains of the army that had 3erved under Creles,
went to Rome, and occupied the Crelian hill, calling it so after his
former commander. He exchanged his Tuscan name l\fastarna for
a Roman one, obtained the kingly power, and wielded it to the
great good of the state 23 •
Now Crelius or Creles Vibenna, and the settling of his army at
Rome on the .hill named after him, were known to the Roman
archeologers, and even mentioned in the Annals. According to
them Creles himself came to Rome : but with regard to the person
who was king at the time, the statements, as Tacitus observesg 4 ,
differed greatly. He himself assumes that it was Tarquinius Pris·
cus : and a mangled passage of Festus, where moreover Creles and
Vibenna are said to have been brothers, seems to have agreed with

* Above p. 104; 921 It may be found in Gruter, p. Dll.

22 ClEli might look like the genitive of Cll!lius; but there is no long I in
the impression, and Claudius, from his love of what was antiquated, declined
Cll!les in this way, like Persi. The Etruscan gentile names ended in na, as
those of the Romans did in ius: thus ClEcina, Spurinv.a, Perpenna, and here
Vivenna and .~fastarna.
23 Servius Tullius, si nostros sequimur, captiva natus Ocresia; si Tus­
cos, Cieli quondam Vi vennre sodalis fidelissimus, omnisque ejus casus comes:
postquam varia fortuna exactus cum omnibus reliquiis Creliani exercitus Etru­
ria ex,cessit, montem Crelium oc~upavit, et a duce &uo Crelio ita appellitatus
(write appellitavit), mutatoque nomine, nam Tusce Mastarna ei nom~n erat,
ita appellatus est ut dixi, et regnum summa cum rcip. utilitate optinmt.
24 Annal. IV. GG. ·
292 HISTORY OF ROME.

him 925 : on the other hand the same Festus in another passage, along
with Dionysius and Varro 26 , places him under Romulus during the
Sabine war: both statements make him come to assist the Roman
kings on their summons. In all these stories, as in the Etruscan
one, he appears as the leader of an army raised by himself and not
belonging to any state, like the bands of the Condottieri, sometimes
serving a master for pay, at others pillaging and exacting contribu­
tions on their own score. \Ve read several times of foreigners
levying men in Etruria, and that too in early ages*: a practice out
of which such dangerous bodies of troops might easily arise.
· I have already remarked that the Lucumo mentioned in the Sa­
bine war is no other than Creles, who was transplanted into the
age of Rornulus 21, because Lucerum existed from time immemorial
by the side of Rome, and the Tuscans on the Cmlian were taken
for Etruscans. This trace leads us further; and, such was the
multiplicity of the legends, it is exceedingly probable that in some
other the supposed Lucumo Tarquinius was identified with this
very Tuscan leader: in that case the calling up of the.lesser houses,
or of the Luceres, answered to the settling of Cmlius and his fol­
lowers. In like manner I also suspect that there was a connexion
between the Roman legend of Tarquinius, the assumed supreme
head of all Etruria, and the Etruscan one of the conqueror Tar­
chon28, the founder of Tarquinii, .who was born with the wisdom
and the gray hairs of old age. This Tarchon however, a descend­
ant of Telephus, was claimed by the Rasena, as Hector and the
Teucrian heroes were by the Greek inhabitants of Ilium : he be­
longs to the Tyrrhenians, and was probably the hero who gave
name to the house of the Tarquins. ,
Here I pause, convinced that, though a few points in the grey

9"25 V. Tuscum Vicum: we ought probably to read secuti for secum, were
.it allowable to amend' a passage where the gaps cannot be filled up with cer­
tainty.
26 Fest. Epit, v. Coelius Mons. Dionysius n, 3G. Varro de L. L. 1v. 8.
p.14; I will remark here by the way that the diphthong oe in the name of the
hill and of the Etruscan commander as well as of the Roman family is an en­
tire mistake, and that we ought always to write Cmlius; and besides, that the
Florentine manuscript of Varro instead of Coelio has Cmle, which Victorius
seems to have overlooked.
* Above p. 97, note 403. ­
27 Above p. 227. Dionysius n, 37. Compare Varro de L. L.1v. 9, p.17.
28 Schol. Veron. on lEn. x. , .flrchon and Darclwn must however surely
be blunders of the scribes, See Strabo v. p. 219. d: above pp. 29. 87, note
362.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 293
distance may appear to be distinguishable from the height, he who
would descend to approach them, would forthwith lose sight of
them, and, having no fixed point to steer by, would wander on a
fruitless journey further and further from his course. The Etrus·
can story, if it had come to us immediately and authentically from
the old Etrnscan annals, could not be gainsaid, but would be irre­
concilable with all the rest of Roman history ; nor would it lead
to any results. But while we take into account that Etruria con­
tinued to flourish till the time of Sylla without losing her national
independence, we may also regard it as certain that during all that
period there was a succession of annalists, among whom, as among
the Roman, the later always knew more than his predecessors,
without having any new sources of information. 'Vherever judg­
ment was requisite, Claudius was quite at a fault: and if the ancient
tale of the faithful and persevering Mastarna retiring to Rome had
been attached to Servius Tullius out of national vanity by any
Etruscan writer, however late his age or arbitrary his procedure,
Claudius would yet have been unable. to distinguish this from a
genuine tradition.
I will not pore any longer over these questions : but this repre­
sentation, like the ordinary one of L. Tarquinius Priscus, clearly
implies the notion that there was a time when Rome received Tus:
can institutions from a prince of Etruria, and was the great and
splendid capital of~ powerful Etruscan state.
Those who saw that a part of the religious knowledge possessed
by the Romans had an Etruscan character, as was confirmed by
the practice continued down to late ages for the Roman youths to
study at the source of oral tradition*, and that all the. profane sci­
ences prevalent at Rome before the introduction of Greek literature
were of Etruscan origin ; and who believed the evidence affirming
that many of the political institutions, and even the names of the
ancient tribes 92 B, came from the same source; were long ago led to
the conviction that the Etruscans were a much more important
element in the ancient Roman nation than they are said to be, at
least by writers now extant. Accordingly, when the tale concern­
ing the Alban origin of Rome had been l!Xcluded from history, the
first bent of thought was to assume that it was an Etruscan colony.
To go thus far, against all ancient authority,, was more than bold:
·but he who contends against rooted prejudices, digging to the bot­

* Above p. 92, note 377.

!);,JL) Volnius in Varro de L. L. 1v. D. p. 17. See above p. 101, note 415.
 294 . HISTORY OF HO.ME.

tom of them and resolved to upset their dominion, cannot possibly

keep himself entirely free from excess ; he is led into it by the
contemptible aspect which every thing connected with the old error
wears in his eyes. Moderation can only come in after the victory
is achieved : then is the time to look into the erroneous opinion
which had previously been current, for those features of truth that
had been crusted over; and the restoring this truth to honour, when
purified from what had made it worthless, is a delightful reward, to
which an honest man will joyfully sacrifice his hypothesis.
As such a reward I esteem my persuasion, in the first place that
at Rome, as in Etruria, a- very great deal which was regarded as
Etruscan was in fact Tyrrhenian, and consequently any thing but
foreign to the Latins;· and next, that that operation of Etruscan in­
fluence upon Rome, which by the Romans w·as implied under the
government of the first L. Tarquinius, by the Rtruscans under the
settlement of the army of Creles, is enough to account intelligibly
for the rest: so that it is not necessary to deny the Latin stock of
the first Romans. .J have gained the conviction that, considering
the lateness of the times when Crere is still spoken of as the Pelas~
gian Agylla, its conquests by the Etruscans, and consequently their
advance to the Tiber, previously to which they could not have
established a colony at ·Rome, cannot be referred to very remote
ages ; and that before the time 'of the Etruscans the Sabines were
a powerful nation in these parts. The point of most importance
would be that the names of the tribes were Tuscan : but is it at all
probable that the etymological explanations given by Volnius were
happier or surer than Varro's Latin ones? even if he did not abuse
his ad vantage that no ~me was capable of judging of what he said.
The Etruscans at one time were masters of Rome ; even if it
was only during the passing conquests by Porsenna: perhaps one
of the three states in its neighbourhood conquered the city, or the
army or' Creles or some other such established itself there. The
former notion, and the conjecture· that Crere planted a colony at
Rome, derive considerable probability from the franchise shared by
and named after the inhabitants of Crere, and from the affinity be-,
tween the religious worship of the two places. The citizens of
the genuine Roman colonies had the franchise of Rome without a
vote; and, so far as it coul<l have any value for a Roman, he had
the franchise of the colony. Had any such town, Antium for in­
stance or Ostia, ma<le itself independent, and grown powerful while
Rome sauk, and had it nevertheless retained its ancient institutions;
in that case the right to such a franchise there might have been de­
 HISTORY OF ROME. 295
nominated the right of the Romans. A like state of things would
very well account for the origin of the Cmrite franchise at Rome:
there is a good deal of plausibility in the derivation of the word
Cr£remonia from Cmre, slight as in such matters is the authority of
the Roman grammarians who give it: and one is naturally ready to
embrace this explanation of the fact, that when the Gauls attacked
the city the sacred treasures of the Roman state were conveyed
for refuge to Cmre*, in preference to other places not more remote.
Still all this does not amount to a proof. Who can tell how for
this connexion was a connexion with Agylla, arid how far with
Crere? Besides the wish to introduce genuine Etruscan laws
would have led an Etruscan sovereign to !!'end for priests and
teachers from the nearest city of his own people; and thus a per·
manent intercourse bet,veen the Roman an<l Cmrite priesthood
might be establishe<l: while as to a community Gf franchise, it ex­
isted at times even with a totally foreign people. The close union
between Rome and Latium, the constitution of the centuries which
was at once common and peculiar to them, are in fact altogether
incompatible with the hypothesis of an Etruscan colony ; but may
be reconciled with that of a very powerful action of Etruscan influ·
ence. If any body pretends that he is able to decide, with confi­
dence in questions of such obscurity, let none listen to himt.
The want of any historical information with regard to the Etrus­
can <lominion at Rome arises not merely from the same general
causes by which history has been destroyod and perverted; but in
times when no written documents exist in an imperishable form, a
people that has delivered itself from a foreign yoke, seeks to blot
out even the memory of its ever having pined in servitude. Thus
after the revival of ancient literature the Italian historians, ashamed
that their country should be governed by barbarians, fabled that
Narses h~d driven the Goths, Charlemange the Lombards, out of
the whole of Italy, and had restored it to the Romans, purged of
the stranger and of his laws.
As to the story of the death of Servius, which has lived for two
thousand years, and willJive as long as a recollection of the Roman
kings endures, it may be of about the same historical reality, as
that the Tuscan chief Mastarna was the son of Ocrisia: Tullia's

" Livy v. 40.

t To understand the foregoing paragraphs the re'ader should be aware
that the author in his first edition inclined strongly to suppose that Rome was
of Etruscan origin, and even started the conjecture that it might be a colony
from Crere.
296 HISTORY OF ROME.

crimes may be no less imaginary than those of Lady Macbeth. But

thus much is infallibly certain, that the laws of the man who c::illed
the commons to freedom, were for the most part rendered abortive:
whether this counter, revolution of the patricians was effected by
mere threats and the crafty usurpation of power, or was attended
with bloodshed and atrocities, is of very little importance. The
fact and its fruits are recorded in the tradition as the reig'n of Tar­
quinius the tyrant.
On the other hand those wholesome laws, the perfecting the state,
and the completing the .city, which presuppose that there was an
earlier condition such as may aptly be termed the Romulean, shed
glory over the reigns of the first Tarquinius and of Servius : the
investigation of these points leads me back again to something that
is really historical and stands on a sure basis.
 THE COMPLETING THE CITY OF ROME.

THE festival of Septimontium preserved the remembrance of a

time when the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Viminal hills were not yet
incorporated with Rome; but the rest of the city, with the excep­
tion of the Aventine, which was and continued to be a borough,
formed a united civic community, to the extent afterward inclosed
within the wall of ServiusB30 • It consisted of seven districts, which
as such still retained each its own holidays and sacrifices. in the age
of Tiberius 81 : Palatium, Velia, Cermalus 8 ~, Crelius, Fagutal, Oppius,
Cispius88 , Not that every one of these places had a claim to be
called a hill: one unquestionably, and perhaps a second, lay in the
plain at the foot of· a hill; Others were heights, which in later
times were reckoned along with some neighbouring hill, as part of
it, with the view of not having more than seven hills in Rome: for
even in regard to this division a form derived from an early age and
a petty state of things was subsequently stretched by the Romans
to fit a very enlarged one84, The Velia was the ridge which·runs

930 Varro (iv. 5. p. 11), according to the Florentine MS, considers Septi­
montium as the ancient name of the place where the city afterward arose:
Ubi nunc est Roma Septimontium.
31 The members of these guilds must be the montani who appear in the
declamation Pro dmno 28 (74): null um est in hac urbe collegium, nulli pagani,
aut montani. The plebs rustica cannot possibly be alluded to in this place.
32 The spelling this name with a C, not a G,·is established by Festus,
the Florentine MS of Varro, and Plutarch (Romul. c. 3); the termination us,
not um, b'y the epitome of Festus.
33 Festus v. Septimontium. Beside these he also mentions the Subura;
that is, one district more than seven : this however was the pagus sucusanus,
or belonged to it; hence the Suburans were pagani, not montani. They may
have taken part in celebrating the Septimontium, from belonging to the liber­
ties of Lucerum, not of Quirium.
34 Not only did the Romans never reckon more than seven hills; but
when Augustus divided the city into regions, though it was entirely for prac­
J.-NN
298 HISTORY OF ROME.

from the Palatine toward the Carinre, the site of the temple of Peace
and of that of Venus and Roma 935 : Oppius and Cispius are the two
hills of the Esquiline: but the Cermalus is the spot at the foot of
the Palatine, where the L~percal and the Ficus Ruminalis were,
and where, before the first Tarq uinius, the surface, when the waters
were high, was flooded from the V elabrum. So that it is by no
means necessary to suppose that the Fagutal was a hill: and since
it is incredible that the wide and convenient plain between the Pa­
latine and the Crelian, Septizonium and the Colosseum, which did
not need draining like the lower levels, should have been unoccu­
pied by buildings and without a name, it seems to me most plausi­
ble to look on this as the Fagutal36•
These places, which had sprung up near one another, were not
united by any ring wall. I have already marked out the line of
the fortifications in the pomcerium of Romulus, and hinted that on
the further side of the Via del Colosseo it abutted on the mound
which protected the Carinre3 7: in the valley beyond, under that
mound, lay Subura, which was then a village 38• The Cispius and
the Crelian, we are to suppose, were strengthened after· the ancient
Italian method by steepening the sides of the hill, and, where the
ground did not allow of this, by a wall and ditch. The Aventine,
from lying insulated, admitted of being easily fortified.
The part most in need of defence was the flat between the Pa­
latine and the Crelian: for this was the only place where there•
were open plains. As the ground abounded in land springs, a moat
·running from the edge of the Aventine toward the neighbourhood
of the Porta Capena, itself supplying the earth for a wall, was the

tical purposes, he determined their number by doubling that of the oldest

divisions. Christian Rome too was very early divided into seven regions.
!l35 For the Carinre as all the older topographers perceived from the con­
tinuance of the name, le carra, and from observation, was the neighbourhood
of S. Pietro in Vincola: and under the Velia lay the temple of the Penates, in
a street leading from the Carinre to .the Forum; perhaps San Cosma. e Da­
miano.
36 The notion that the Fagutal was a part of the Esquiline rests on the
misinterpretation of a passage in Varro (1v. 8. p. 15.), which says nothing of
the kind. .
37 Above p. 220. Varro de L. L.1v. 8. p. 15. Subura sub muro terreo
Carina.rum.
38 Varro iu the same place : Subura, Junius scribit, ab eo quod fuerit
sub antiqua urbe,-quod subest ei loco qui terreue murus vocatur._ Sed ego a
pago potius Sucusano, dictum puto SucusaJn. Pagu11 Sucusanus, quod sue·
currit Carinis.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 299
fortification that nature pointed out. This was the line of the
Marrana or· ditch of the Quirites, mentioned among the works of
Ancus 989 : here alone can it be looked for by any one who calls to
mind what was then the state of the city, and not upon the plain
where the wall of Servius was afterward erected: for the Qui­
rinal and Viminal did not yet form part of Rome.
The establishing a local communication to unite Septimontium
with the hills of Quirium on the one side, on the other with the
Aventine, was the beginning of a new city. It commenced with
the building the Cloaca Maxima, which carried off the collected
waters of the Velabrum, and which its founder made of such
dimensions that it could receive still larger afRuxes. "Without en­
croaching on the domain of Roman topography, a historian may
record of. this astonishing structure, that its innermost vault is a
semicircle 18 Roman palms in width and in heighth; that this is
inclosed within a second, and this again within a third ; and that
they are all formed of hewn blocks of peperino, 7t palms long, and
4t high, fixed together without cement. This river-like sewer
discharges into the Tiber through a sort of gate in the quay; which
is iirr the same style of architecture, and must have been erected
at the same time, inasmuch ·as it dams off the river from the Vela­
brum which was redeemed from it. It was only for the Ve•
labrum and the valley of Circus that this Cloaca sufficed: far more
extensive structures were requisite to convey into. it the waters
drained off from the land about the Forums and the Subur~. toge­
ther with what .came down from the hills. And a vault no less
astonishing than the one just described \Vas discovered during the
excavations in the year 1742 40 , passing off from the Velabrum,
under the Comitium and the Forum, as far as S. Adriano, 40
palms below the present surface: the nature of the ground shows
evidently that it might be traced from thence under the Forum of
Augustus.i up to the Subura49•

!)39 Above, p. 269.

40 Ficoroni Vestigia di Roma p. 74, 75.
41 Which Hirt and Piale have recognized in what since Donati has been
called the Forum of Nerva. The vault must pass under the Arco de' Pan­
tani: that enormous wall can never have been built directly across it.
42 Of which express evidence is contained in the lines of Juvenal, v.
104,105,
Tiberinus--
Vernula riparum pinguis torrente cloaca,
Et solitus medire cryptam penetrare Suburre.
300 HISTORY OF ROME.

The part of it however then uncovered between the Fenili and S.

Adriano must be of a much later age than the Cloaca in the Vela·
brum: for Ficoroni, an extremely estimable authority, mentions,
only cursorily it is true-but he was an eyewitness and cannot have
used a wrong word here-that it was built of travertino : and this
material did not come into use until long after the time of the kings,
who employed Alban or Gabine stone. From the very first indeed
there must unquestionably have been a sewer from the Subura;
else the Forum could never have been constructed: but this object
might be attained, though not permanently, by means of such drains
as are built at present. Dionysius relates from C. AciliusD48 , who
wrote after 570, that a thousand talents, near two hundred thousand
pounds of our money, were once spent by the censors in improving
the sewers : tor sewers so built as those we now see, there could
never have been any need of laying out a single as. Earthquakes,
the pressure of buildings, the neglect of fifteen hundred years, have
not moved a stone out of its place ; and for ten thousand years to
come those vaults will stand uninjured as at this day. If however
in the room of an irnperf~t structure in need of repairs they sub·
stituted an indestructible one like that of Tarquinius, but executed
with the storie then in higher esteem, this might require that sum,
and yet, if carelessly related, might pass for nothing mote than a
reparation 44 • That the waters from the valley of the Circus like·
wise flowed into the Cloaca Maxima, is evident: so probably did
those from the forums between the Capitoline and the river. On
the other hand. the drainage of the seventh and ninth regions formed
a completely distinct system; ·and the notion that in the name of
the church S • .l:lmbrogio in maxima the word understood is cloaca,
is utterly untenable 45 ,
Since the Esquiline was already part of Septimontium, Livy's
account that Servius Tullius erected buildings and increased the
population upon it, but that the hills he united with the city were
the Quirinal and Viminal46 , gives a much correcter view of the

943 The Vatican MS gives' A11.IA;.ior: instead of 'A11.'7i.1or: m. 67.

44 The period after the first Punic war, when the contribution of Car­
thage, amounting to above six hundred thou11and pounds (Polyb. 1. 63), flowed
into the Roman treasury, is most probably the time at which this work was
executed. We can hardly conceive that any thing so luxurious as the use of
travcrtino prevailed earlier.
45 The true word is probably porticu.
46 Livy I. 44. Addit duos colles, Quirinalem, Viminalemque. lnde dein­
ceps auget Esquilias, ibique ipse habitat. Only he ought to have mentioned
the Capit?line hill along with the other two.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 301

gradual progress with which changes are brought about, than the
statement which includes that double hill among those first taken
into the city by Servius. That nothing but insulated villages stood
in those days on the Oppius and Cispius, may be inferred, because
in the distribution of the city into four regions Subura and the Ca·
rime made part of the Crelian region, not of the Esquiline.*
In a military point of view the union of the whole city was
effected by the erection of the wall. The connecting the Colline
region with the Esquiline was so entirely dependent upon and the
consequence of such a wall, that here again Livy, who following
older accounts calls Servius its builder 947, proceeds with much more
consistency than Di-0nysius and Pliny who ascribe it to Tarquinius
the tyrant48 • · But whatever name it may be associated with, it was
scarcely a less work than the Cloaca, and worthy to excite the
astonishment of Plinyt, although the Colosseum had been built in
his time by the incalculable riches of the empire. This mound
extended from the Colline to the Esquiline gate, seven stadiums or
seven-eighths .of a mile: out of a moat above a hundred feet broad
and thirty deep-for there is no stone here, only puzzolana-was
raised a wall fifty feet wide, and consequently above sixty high,
faced toward the moat with a skirti.ng of flag stones, and flanked
with towers. But the Colline gate was situate where the Quirinal
had already sunk to a flat level; and a similar wall connected it
with the western steeps of that hill49 , where we may place the
boundary of the ancient Sabine town. .
The Viminal, at the time of its. being taken into the city, seems
to have been still entirely uncultivated, and overgrown with osier
thickets, .whence its name; as that, of the Esquiline came from its

* Varro de L. L. IV. p. 15.

!)47 Aggere et fossis et muro circumdat urbem.

48 Strabo does not by any means speak so distinctly in favour of Servi us,
ns at first sight it seems: IV. P· 235. c. And the fancy that Dionysius knew
it to have been his work, only forgot to mention that the wall which he attri­
butes to Tarquinius (1v. 54) was a different one, could never have occurred
except to Nardini, the corrupter of' Roman topography, which before his time
was much better understood. If' the city was left open or weakly fortified on
this side, where the Quirinal and Viminal descend by a gentle slope into the
plain, it made not tlie slightest difference whether the Gabines hit upon this
weak spot as they came along the high road, or whetl1er, to get to it, they
were forced to cross the country for half a Roman mile to the right. In a
Tuscan war, as the city was covered by the Tiber and Anio, such weakness
was far less dangerous.
t H. N. III. 9.

49 Nibby Mura di Roma. p. 110.

 302 HISTORY OF ROME.

oak woods 950 • This enlargement was the idea of a mind that trusted
in the eternity and the destinies of the city, and was preparing a
way for its advance. We are not to suppose that a regular town
existed in the part near the wall till long after: but before it arose
the fortified enclosure received the peasant with his cattle in time
of war, and afforded a safe place of pasture, like the long walls of
Athens. Besides there is a singular justice in Cicero's expression,
that Rome stands on a healthy spot in the midst of a pestilential
country 51• The air in the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo must
have been just as noxious in summer then as now : nay, even be­
tween the wall of Servius and the present walls, on the Esquiline
and Viminal fields, it is unhealthy ; and the countryfolk then as
now must have retired during the summer months into the city; so
that for them dwellings were wanted 59 • They may have found
th.em on the Esquiline, as may others on the Aventine and Crelian;
and this explains how it came to pass that Rome, where trade was
only carried on for the mere neci!ssaries of life, and where both the
burghers and the commonalty consisted wholly of farmers, had so
large a compass, and yet in those days the country was not left
without inhabitants •.- When the vintage and regular field labours
begins, the bad air has disappeared, and the peasant may again
pass the night on his field: and when it returns, he has harvested
his corn. On the east and south the wall of Servius seems accu­
rately to follow the limit marked out by nature for the city: on this
side no blessing has attended the overstepping his inaugurated po·
mmrium. And still· the people unconsciously acknowledge his
ancient Rome to be the true city : the vine-dresser or gardener
about the Lateran or Santa Bibiena says, he is going to Rome, or
coming from it, just as much as he that lives withounhe walls of
Aurelian.
The mound that has been described, and such lines as it was
necessary in other places to carry across the vallies, and the towers
and walls at the gates which barred an ascent, were the only works
raised by man: elsewhere the city was fortified solely by the steep·

950 From spots covered with the tallest kind of oak, the tIJScvlus: see Voss
on Virgil's Georgics n. 16. In Va.rro's til,Jle this hill was still full of small
sacred groves : de L. L. 1v. p. 15.
51 Locum in regione pestilenti salubrem: de Re p. u. 6.
52 For determining the site of such Latin towns as were destroyed in
early times, the air may serve as a negative criterion: they are all to be looked
for upon the hills; and no place where the country people cannot live through
the summer, can well have been a town 2500 years ago.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 303
ness of its .hills 958 , When the Gauls had clomb up the Capitoline,
they were in the citadel; so it cannot have been protected by any
wall. The circumference of the city, a little larger than that of
Athens 5 •, did not measure six miles: on the Janiculum there may
have stood a fort: but the notion that walls came down from it and
reaching to the Tiber covered the bridge, is utterly mistaken : the
bridge was out of the city55 : its wall stretched from the Tarpeian
rock along the Aventine, between the Circus and the river, and may
still be traced where a continuous ridge of rubbish cuts across all
the allie:;i in the Velabrum. '
These works and the building of the Capitoline temple declare
with an irresistible voice that Rome under her later kings was the
capital of a great state.

953 Dionysius ix. 68. 54 Dionysius 1v. 13. u:. 68.

55 The proofs for these assertions, which are by no means newly taken
up, will be given in another place.
 THE SIX EQUESTRIAN CENTURIES.

THE increase of the senate, whereby the number of_ senators was
raised to three hundred, is ascribed to the first Tarquinius by every
writer, with the exception of one who mistakes the character of the
lesser houses 958 • On the. other hand, there are great discrepancies
in the statements as to the number he introduced; with respect to
which, and to my opinion that this increase was effected by admit­
ting the third class, it would be an idle repetition for me. to speak
again 57 •
The most difficult point however in the whole earlier history of
the constitution is the formation of the three new centuries attri­
buted to the same king: an innovation which, inasmuch as it con­
fines itself to an extension of the Romulean constitution, is placed,
in consonance to the spirit of such personifications, before the time
of Servius Tulli~s ; while it is later than the calling up of the Lu­
ceres into the senate, by which act that constitution received its
complete development. If the Ramnes, Tit~es, and Luceres, were
in fact centuries and tribes of the houses, although the troops of
horsemen were also called by the name of the tribe they belonged
to; then the centuries formed by Tarquinius and named after the
old ones, but as secondary to them, were likewise tribes of houses :
and nothing less than the design of creating new centuries out of
new houses, to stand along side of the old ones, could give occasion
to the extreme violence with which Navius opposed him, and to
the miracle wrought in support of it: a mere change in military
arrangements would never have met with such unbending resist­
ance, even from the most stiff-necked of augurs. Thus much is
clear, that the sovereign wished to form three new tribes of houses,
partly out of his own retainers, partly from amo1.1g the commons,
956 Tacitus, xx. 25; with regard to whose statement see the text to note
1158.
57 See above p. 220.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 305
and to name them after himself and his friends; so that there would
have been six of them: nor is it less clear that Attus N avius, acting
in the spirit of the old citizens, withstood the king to the utmost,
and even called in heaven to his aid. Was this the prince who
conceived this project, really Tarquinius? or was he au Etruscan?
If he yielded to the resistance of the nation, he certainly cannot be
regarded as a conqueror. But in what sense are we to understand
that he yielded? since he still formed three new centuries; which,
being united with the old ones under the name of the six suffragia,
outlived the constitution of the classes such as it came from the
hands of Servius Tullius. And again how came it that the number
of the curies still continued to be .thirty, as in the original three
centuries or tribes ? When Tarquinius purposed to create three
new tribes, he must have intended to divide these like the former
three into thirty curies, and to establish that number of new ones :
this however did not take place,
There are, it seems to me, only two suppositions which can help
us to solve this enigma. '\Ve may assume that the original three
hundred houses still existed in their full compliment; and that the
same number of new ones were either formed, or, being already in
existence among the commons, were admitted into the body of
burghers; so as to assign ten new houses to every cury, the number
of the curies remaining as before, but, inasmuch as each cury was
now twice as numerous, only five curies instead of ten being reck­
oned to a century, which even in this manner would still consist of
a hundred houses.
It is ~uch more probable however that, when the alteration took
place, the original number of the houses had long since fallen short:
for every exclusive aristocracy, which omits to replace such houses
as become extinct, dies away ; and that too with precipitous rapid­
ity, if it be strict in insisting on purity of descent; so that it must
sink into an oppressive and hateful oligarchy 958 • Now supposing

958 Let any one compare lists of the families of freeholders in any Ger­
man province several hundred years ago and at present. Formerly they were
a considerable portion of the whole· free rustic population: how many in a
hundred are there now in the same province? where a part of the gaps has
not been filled up by.families of strangers settling amongst them, or by the
rise of new families from among the old inhabitants. And after all what has
been filled up has been no more than a small part. Among the ancients in
the common course of things a replenishment of this sort was impossible.
There are oligarchs who ·regard the share of the aristocracy in the adminis­
tration of government as a tontine, where the total property belonging to the
1.-00
306 HISTORY OF ROME.

that some half of the houses were become extinct, that every cury
on an average no longer contained more than five, then, if the re­
mainder amounting to about a hundred and fifty were collected
together into half the number of the original curies, and the vacant
fifteen were filled with newly adopted houses, the ancient propor­
tion of ten houses to a cury remained undisturbed.
And this latter hypothesis is confirmed, and almost established,
by the statement that Tarquinius doubled the senate, raising the
number from 150 to 300; just as the doubling the cavalry and the
centuries is ascribed to him. Only here two changes are con­
founded, between which a considerable interval would probably
elapse. If every house had a member to represent it, 'the senate
of the first two estates, after many of the houses had become ex­
tinct, can no longer have amounted to· two hundred; and the third
estate also must nave 'been unable to depute a hundred senators,
long before its council was ·incorporated with the supreme one.
The calling up of the Luceres thrrefore would be far from raising
the senate to three hundred, as would have bet{n the case if the
complement of houses had been full: and, without weighing the
numbers too minutely, we may combine the two statements, which
represent the senate, the one as having been increased by a hun­
dred, the other as having been doubled: the former being effected
in conformity to the original plan of the constitution, the latter by
creating the three new centuries. The first of these measures must
have been the earlier, but the second too must have preceded the
legislation of Servius •
. One might strain one's ingenuity in considering whether the new
equestrian centuries were not more likely than those of the third
estate to be called the lesser ones. In such dim twilight all appear­
ances are deceptive: I rather incline however to believe that each
of the additional centuries shared in the honours. of its elder name­
sake; because the colleges of priests continued to be filled exclu­
sively from the two superior estates, each of which appointed two,
corresponding to its two centuries. In like manner all the six
centuries were represented by the six Vestals·"'·

survivors continues unchanged, and every individual finds himself all the
better off, the mote of his comrades have died away.
In Zealand the nobles were become wholly extinct; in Holland they were
so within four or five families; the free peasantry in northern Holland were
not admitted into the states: hence the towns of necessity acquired exclusive
possession of the government. ·
* See above, p. 230.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 307

Instances are not proofs, but in history are scarcely of less force;
above all where they exhibit a parallel in the progressive develop­
ment of institutions. The following is the history of a constitution
consisting of curies and houses, which will show that the changes
and developments pointed out in the foregoing remarks are not
arbitrarily devised: and since' the place where, this constitution
existed is intimately connected with o"ur classical recollections, the
account of it is by no means alien to this work.
It was a pleasing thought of the Neapolitan jurists, that the seggj
of their native city had arisen out of the Greek phratries : and if it
was a delusion to derive the old and perple:\ing name of those bo­
dies, tocchj, from the Greek e"'""• yet it is hard to keep oneself
from being led astray by it. At all events however that derivation
must not pass for more t}ian a venerable reminiscence : for sub­
stantially all we can expect to find in Naples under its dukes, as ill
all the other free cities dependent upon the Roman throne at Con­
stantinople, is a constitution arising out of the municipal institutions
of. the western empire, an ordo and possessores. These proprieta­
ries, whose nobility consisted, like the eu/'iwot of the Greeks, in
hereditary birth and hereditary wealth, were registered according
to their lineage in tocclif, which were connected with particular dis­
tricts of the city, and were of two kinds. Of the great tocclij, ac­
cording to the earliest mention of them, there were four, to whkh
two were afterward added: the number of the lesser cannot be de­
termined, since they are only spoken of incidentally. The former
may be compared to the tribes, the latter to the curies ; with this
difference, about which there can be no question, that both were
open to receive new citizens. Tocchj was .the ancient name for
their places of assemblage or chambers, their curies; but under the
kings of the house of Anjou they obtained that of seggj.
These kings, who pursued a system of grounding their usurpa­
a
tion on feudality and military noblesse, changed the character of
the Neapolitan citizens, by their readiness to bes.tow knighthood
on such as were well born or even rich : and since the foreign no­
bles who resided in the capital, took care to be enrol1ed in the seggj,
the consequence was, that, at the time when every where else the
power of the noble houses in the towns was sinking, at Naples an
aristocracy of houses was introduced.· The newly admitted citi­
zens must have entered immediately into the six great seggj: for
the lesser all gradually disappear ; because, as is expressly stated,
the few families that were left in them became extinct.
Thus only the six great seggj remained : and these by the union
308• HISTORY OF ROME.
of two were reduced to five; probably with the view of giving the
vacated one to the commonalty, against whom the tribes on becom­
ing noble had been shut ; and who in this country could not suc­
ceed in establishing any thing like corporate institutions, while the
kings were in need of their assistance against the turbulent nobility.
The five noble seggj were not absolutely closed: but the recep­
tion even of noblemen into them was so obstructed, that the number
of families in them continually lessened ; while there was a conti­
nual incr'3ase of the nobles who resided in the city without being
admitted among the members, and yet were superior to many of
them in rank and honours. This is the parallel to the state of
things I conceive to have existed at Rome, when the reformer,
whom we call Tarquinius Priscus, was desirous of forming new
tribes. The last mentioned families made interest with the Spanish
kings that they would vouchsafe to erect a new seggio : but,
wretched and paltry as were the privileges of a Neapolitan patri­
cian, the jealousy of the oligarchy opposed their reasonable request,
and yet was just as unwilling to receive them and distribute them
among the existing seggj*. But in course of time it gave way in
single exceptions ; and thus things went on, until the revolutionary
government of 1799 got rid of the seggj and eletti, and the restored
one availed itself of this riddance, no less than of that of every ·other
corporate institution which presented even the shadow of a limit to
its arbitrary will, as so much gain to itself. Indeed this municipal
co.nstitution had long since become so worthless and open to abuse,
nay mischievous, that neither did its venerable origin excite inte­
'rest at the time of i~ abolition, nor is its loss now felt.
Every person had a vote in a seggio, who belonged to any patri­
cian family enrolled in it, whatever his residence might be; and in
fact this institution was far more a representation of the barons of
the whole kingdom, than of the citizens, or even the nobles of the
city. ..
Had Naples been the capital of Campania alone; had its eonsti~
tution lived and grown, enlarged and completed itself, in that case
the ottine of the people would have become plebeian tribes, in the
same way in which the Roman commons obtained a constitution,
and thereby multiplied the vital energies of the republic.

* Giannone xx. 4.
THE 001\flVIONALTY, AND THE PLEBEIAN

TRIBES.

IN every state the constitution of which has been grounded on a

certain number of houses, a commonalty 959 has grown up or sub­
sisted by the side of the burghers or the freeholders. The mem­
bers of this commonalty were not only recognized as freemen, but
also _as fellow-countrymen: they received like succour against
foreigners, were under the protection of the laws, mig-ht acquire
real property, had their motes for making by-laws and their courts,
were bound to serve in time of war, but were excluded from the
government, which was confined to the houses. 60
The origin of such a com_monalty, though admitting of many
varieties, in cities mostly coincides with that of the rights of the
pale-burghers; of the dwellers within the pale or the contado 61 : but
it increased in extent and still more so in importance, when a city
acquired a domain, a. distretto, containing towns and other small
places. The inhabitants of such a domain were sometimes taken
in a mass under the protection of the law and admitted to the rights
of freemen; more frequently this was done for su'ch as removed
into the city: these would be persons of very different rank, gentle
and simple.. In like manner freemen out of such foreign places as
were connected by a community of civic or national law, and bond­
men who obtained their freedom with the consent of their lords,

959 It commune. When a number of such commonalties exist in a larger

state, along with the ruling part of the nation, they are les communes, tlte
commons.
60 This was also the condition ofthe proselytes of righteousness in Judea.
Those of the gate answered to the metics.
61 Like the English pale in Ireland, before James the First. In Ger­
many·they were called pfalilbUrger,pale·burghers, which in French wus dis­
torted into fauxbourgeois.
310 HISTORY OF ROME.

were received into the commonalty: so that,' from the variety of

elements it contained, its name ·was fully justified by its nature.
Now since among the ancients civic trades and commerce were
in low repute, while agriculture was in the highest; whereas during
the middle ages the sc'ale of their estimation was directly reversed;·
it came to pass that in the former period the commonalty was often
m'ade up of the inhabitants of the domain; in the latter on the other '
hand the neighbouring country was seld<;>m admitted to a fellowship
of rights, but within the walls there grew up a commonalty of arti­
sans and tradesmen of all sorts. These were impelled by a feeling
of their necessities to unite in companies, which in consequence of
their local compression developed such a force as was not to be
found among the rural population: but owing to this peculiarity in
their nature, the revolutions by which the commons gained the
upper hand in the middle ages, had an entirely different character
from that of those whereby the demus or the plebs among the
ancients acquired first freedom, and then the superiority in the
state: the consequences too were entirely different'. The govern,
ment of the traders and manufacturers made the free cities unwar­
like, as Machiavel remarks with regard to Florence ; that of the
country people made them bold and firm, as was the case at Rome.
As opposed to the houses, the demus, the plebs, and the com­
monalty are the same thing, and of the same kind: in order how­
ever to form a picture oJ what the plebeians were, and of the station
they occupied alongside of the citizens, let the reader take-as an
easily intelligible instance from among a multitude-the territory
of Zurich, before the change which brought the government into
the hands o( the guilds, when it equalled th~ present canton in
extent, and with its nobles, its free peasantry, and its country
towns, constituting a compact whole, was inseparably attached to
the city, in such a manner that while the houses formed one part
of the state, the free members of the commonalty in the city were
united into one body with the country folks*.
Still this difference between a civic and rustic commonalty does
not destroy the parallel· in the history of the free constitutions

See Miiller's Hi~tory of Switze.r1<µ1d Book n. chap. 2 .. The reader

may find much light thrown on these interesting questions in the third volume
of Hiillmann's Geschichte des Ursprungs der Stiinde in Deutschland; in Eich­
horn's Deutsche' Staats und Rechtsgeschiclite, especially in sections 310-313,
431-434; and in .a dissertation on the origin of the constitutions of the Ger­
man towns by the same Eichhorn in the first and second volu.mes of Savig­
n y 's Z~itschrift f iir gescltichtliche Rcchtswissensr,haft.
 HISTORY OF RO.ME. 311

<luring the iwo golden ages of cities. In both ages it is the history
of the conflict between' the privileged houses and the commonalty:
the latter, feeling· that it is come of age and ripe for a constitution
and a share in the government, (i .. n,.opl~) ; the former striving to
keep it in subjection and servitude. The struggle was unequal;
for a spreading growing power encountered one that was pent in
and dwindling away: nor has any thing but the prudent use made
of some casual advantage gained by open force, or of some disas­
ter, turned the scale against the commonalty, wherever this has
been the result. Such a victory of the privileged houses was the
worst thing that could happen; for then they always degenerated;
and beneath their unlimited power the commonwealth went morally
and politically to decay, as has been seen at Nurenberg. Where
the disputes came to an amicable adjustment by a compact and the
establishment of a balance, they were followed by happy times ;
which might have been of long continuance, if the aim of the aris­
tocracy had been to renovate and thus to prolong its existence ;
whereas when it contracted itself and shrivelled up into an oligar­
chy, it became impotent as opposed to the buoyant vigour of life.
Often the conflict was waged with great ferocity, in cases where
stubborn arrogance refused to make room for the rights of the
power that was coming into being9 69 , or rather already existed; nay
mounted the higher in its pretensions, the more it ought to have
lowered them. On the other hand the houses frequently yielded
almost without resistance : as in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen­
turies the constitutions of many Italian and German towns were
changed with mutual good will, after the example set by some of
the great cities.
A government conducted by privileged houses, so long as they
are still numerous, and actually the powerfullest, purest and noblest
part of the community, is the original idea of an aristocracy: the
predominance of the commonalty is what at first was denoted by
the name of democracy. In later times the primitive simple mean­
ing of the two words had fallen into oblivion; and it was then
attempted .to define them from some of' their accidental properties.
In Aristotle's time aristocracies in the genuine ancient sense were
hardly to be found, here and there one: such as had not become
democracies had long before shrunk up into oligarchies: the same
power as their ancestors had exercised was now exercised by a

\162 Da.s Recht tlrs Wf·rdrml1m it has he<'n <·allt•d hy n Swi•s w~ill•r, Trox-
In.
312 HISTORY OF ROME.

much smaller number over a commonalty which was become

greatly more numerous and imp.ortant; and in proportion as the
latter felt its dignity and its rights, and the disparity became glaring,
the power was wielded distrustfully, rancorously, with the set pur­
pose of stifling what was growi,ng up. When legislators however
wished to escape from a democracy, in the sense then assigned to
it, they, like those of our times, knew of no other expedient than
to take property for a standard; a measure which the philosophers
judged to be utterly condemnable and oligarchal. The union of an
aristocracy in full vigour with a commonalty was by them esteemed
the justest and wholesomest constitution: this they called a polity,
the Italians in the middle ages popolo.
But the great difficulty in h~man instiutions is to ward off the
approach of numbness and of decay. It mostly happened that
even a polity, where it was established, nay often that a complete
democracy so fenced itself in, that a body of freemen sprang up by
its side out of new elements appertaining to the commonwealth;
which body was essentially a commonalty, just as much so as
those who had attained to an equality of rights; only it did not bear
the name; a body of free peasants or handicraftsmen, who were
kept in the back ground, and whose exclusion, if their strength
become considerable, was quite as injurious to the state, or at all
events quite as unjust, as that of the others. The most signal and
momentous example of this is afforded by the later ages of the Ro­
man republic: its ruin arose from a stoppage in that development
of its political system, which by the admission and elevation of
the commonalty had made the state powerful and glorious ; from
the Italian allies not being invested oue after another with the Ro­
man franchise. Instances on a smaller scale may be .found in
every state by which a new. territory was acquired: the Bceotian
districts which. made a transfer of themselves to the Athenians,
enjoyed the advantages resulting from a community of laws; but
their citizens did not become citizens of Athens : the territories
subject to the Swiss towns had a like claim to civic rights as the
guilds had had some centuries before: and in my native Ditmarsh
the Strandmen, whom the archbishopric of Bremen made over to
the republic, when the aristocracy of the houses had ceased to exist,
were a commonalty; which had no voice in the public assembly,
and no privileged houses.
The demus in Attica, in the state Solon found it in, was a com­
monalty formed by the inhabitants of the country, divided no doubt
 HISTORY OF ROME. 313

and ranged~ even then into demes or wards 063 ; and contradistin­
guished from the houses: the parties which it split into, and which
the eupatrids induced to engage in their feuds, corresponded to
the local character of the land. The members of these demes
were those among the posterity of the ancient Atticans who had
preserved their freedom, and had not been degraded into thetes,
either by violence at the Ionian immigration, or subsequently by
distress and the sale of their own persons. In the constitution of
Clisthenes this demus was already become predominant in the
state. ·
The Roman commonalty, the plebs, arose like others out of a
medley of elements, as it was by incorporating tmch that it sup­
ported and immense,ly enlarged itself. Even in the original three
towns a commonalty must from the first have begun to form, out
of such persons as were received under the protection of the law,
and of clients, as well those who were free hereditarily, as those
whose bondage had expired ·by their emancipation with their
patron's consent, pr by the extinction of his race. This common­
alty, had it continued alone, would never have risen out of obscu­
rity: on the contrary the destination of the civic tribes in later
times to receive such citizens as were of servile descent is to be
accounted for from this being their origin. The genuine, noble,
great plebs takes it rise from the formation of a domain out of the
towns won from the Latins. In the accounts of the conquests·
made by the first· kings it is stated that many of the conquered
places were converted into colonies, that the others were destroyed
and the inhabitants carried to Rome; where they, along with the
citizens of the coldnies, received the Roman franchise 64 • 'Vith
regard to the origin of the plebs of king Ancus however, we are
to suppose that after the destruction of Alba a portion of the Latins
were ceded by a treaty adjusting the clai~s of Rome and Latium,

963 In the fragment of the laws of Solon, I. 4. D. de collegiis (XL vu. 22),
J'iµo' ·is used for a corporation. '
64 This.state of things was not unknown to Dionysius; only he saw it in
the Annals through a mist and in a wrong place; to wit, after the death ofRo­
mulus, during the feud between the Ramnes and Tities: If 62. Hence he
makes a distinction there among the patrician~, between· the ,.,,.;<T<tM'" 'l'Hr
'lTOAlv and the t?To1Jt.01: saying however at the same time, that among the de.
mus many of those who had been recently admitted into the nation, that is,
the inhabitants of the conquered towns to whom Romulus had granted the
Roman franchise, were dlscontentcd because tliey had not received any land.
Here we see the plebs, vainly demanding its share of the ager pub/;cus, and
what was its origin.
J.-PP
314 HISTORY OF ROME.

and thus were placed in a like relation of affinity to Romeeas. The

names of the conquered places given by the historians rest on no
sufficient authority; nor can it be any thing but an accident that
they are all Latin towns: whatever people these new members of
the state may have belonged to, their collective body formed a
commonalty. Their franchise resembled that which in later
times was citizenship without a vote; for a vote could not be given
except in the curies: hut their condition was worse than that of
those who afterward stood on this footing: for they could not in­
termarry with the patricians, and all their relations with them were
uniformly to their prejudice. Nevertheless these new citizens,
scantily as they were endowed with rights, were not made up then,
any more than in later times, merely of the lower orders: the
nobles of the conquered and ceded towns were among them; as
subsequently we find that, the Mamilii, the Papii, the Cilnii, the
Crecinre, were all plebeians. ,
, Now that the plebeian commonalty arose out of the freemen thus
incorporated with the state1 is sufficiently proved by the tradition
that Ancus assigned habitations on the Aventine tll the Latins from
the towns which had become subject to Rome: for this hill was
afterward the site of what was peculiarly the plebeian city. The
statement indeed that they were conveyed thither is not historical:
it is impossible that such an enormous population should have been
amassed· at Rome, so as to be prevented from cultivating its remote
estates. Those who chose to settle there had the Aventine allotted
them as a place for a suburb where they might live apart under
their own laws: far the greater portion staid in their home: but
their towns ceased to be c9rporations. The· territory of a place that
had been taken by storm, or had s1:1rrendered unconditionally, be­
longed by the Italian law of nations to the state: a part of it con­
tinued to be public property, and was tu'rned to account by the
patricians for themse] ves and their vassals : a part fell to the share
of the crown: the rest was parcelled out and assigned by the
kings to the old proprietors, in their new capacity of Romans.
Often probably the confiscation did not extend beyond the public
domain.
Here I, will merely suggest the notion, le;iving it to rest on its
own merits, that, as in a much later age .M. Manlius was looked
up to by the collective plebeian order as its declared patron, so at
the first beginning of the commonalty the ki,pgs were it3 patrons.

965 Above p. 271.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 315

At all events it is a gross error, which leads us to frame the most

unjust judgments, to suppose that the plebeians sprang out of the
clients of the patricians, and consequently must have been insur­
gent hereditary bondmen. That the clients were total strangers to
the plebeian commonalty, and did not coalesce with it until late,
when the bond of servitude had been foosened, partly from the
houses of their patrons dying off or sinking into decay, partly from
the'advance· of the whole nation toward freedom, will be proved in
the sequel of this history: and the most decisive expressions on the
point will be quoted from Dionysius himself; for, though it is true
he has distinctly conceived that erroneous notion, yet in his details
he copies the ohl Roman Annals, in which the correct view of the
relation had not been lost*. Cntain as this is, it is no less so that,
whatever may have been the form of the connexion between the
commonalty and the kings, they protected it against the oligarchy0 66 :
undoubtedly they could ·_not fail to perceive that the plebeians in a
continually increasing proportion formed the most important part of
their military force; that on them all .the hopes of the future rested;
and that the only way for Rome to become great and to continue
so, was for its laws to sanction and promote the growth of a great
Roman people out of every people of Italy.
The existence of the plebs, as acknowledgedly a free and a very
numerous portion of the nation, may be traced back to the reign of
Ancus : but before the time of Servius it was only an aggi:egate of
unconnected parts, not a united regular ·whole. The natural divi­
sion for a rural commonalty was into districts; and such a one we
find at Rome as well as inAttica67. In its principle, like the division
of the hquses, it was adapted to the state of things already existing;
but in like manner it did not merely collect the elementary parts such
as it found them one beside the other, as chance had determined
their number and• variety: the territory 'was portioned out into a
fixed number of districts; in some of which perhaps such lines of
demarcation as before subsisted might be preserve,d unchanged, but
the majority must have acquired a new form during the process of
separation and re-union. ' When Clisthenes divided the people of
Attica into a hundred demes 68 , it is evident that he proece. ded in this

* See below notes 1306--1316.

966 As the sta.tholders protected the citizens in the Dutch towns against
the oligarchal magistracy.
67 cpu>.otl 'l"07rJ1<11.i: see above note 787, p. 232. Lmlius Felix in Gellius,
xv. 27: comitia tributa esse cum ex regionibus et locis suffragium feratur.
68 Herodotus v. 69. The ceta.inty of this statement is no way shaken
by our meeting with more than a hundred names in after times. For in the
 316 HISTORY OF ROME.

way: demes he found already there, but such a number can never
have been the work of chance. Servius too, who distributed the
Roman plebs into a determinate number of tribes, assuredly did
1
not bind himself to observe such relations as previously existed,
the remains of which can only have continued to endure in some of
the pagi. In process of time however, as has been remarked
above, this local distribution transformed itself into a hereditary one
according to families 9 Ag: for if a person removed from Acharnre
to Rhamnus, he still continued an Acharnian, belonging to the
phyle Oeneis, and so did.his posterity for ever. Only doubtless
there was a possibility at Athens, on showing valid grounds for
such an application, of migrating into a different phyle: and the
Roman censors, who at least in the later times of the republic often
changed the tribe of a citizen at discretion, must always have had
it in their power to comply with requests for transfers of this sort,
when made with regard to tribes enjoying an equality of rights.
An incomparably more important distinction of these local tribes
however was that they were not closed against new members ; that,

first place there was nothing to hinder the forming fresh demes, by subdi­
viding old ones, or by incorporating new districts : next, the lexicographers
unquestionably often give the name of a de~e to what was in fact a house :
and lastly, at Athens too it was,only in the course of time that the patricians
were received into the ten tribes, and, when they were so, many houses may
perhaps have entered in their corporate capacity, so as to form entire demes.
969 See pp. 235. 236. In modern history I know no instance of the same
kind in a democracy, except in the canton of Schweitz, where, until the revo­
lution, the sovereign estatesmen were distributed into six quarters, four of
them original, and two additional ones. These quarters had local names ; but
it was not.the dweller in a p)ace, for instance in Arth, that belonged to the
quarter of Arth; but he whose ancestors had been registered there. Fiisis
Erdbeschreilrung, vol. u. p. 245. This order of things must now have been re­
established in substance, though modified in its application, because that part
of the population of the canton which was formerly in a state of dependence,
must have been admitted into the quarters. In an aristocratical constitution,
the above mentioned Seggj at Naples unquestionably furnish a like example:
and the same principle must have prevailed with regard to the noble houses
in the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany, which were registered according to
their quarters, if any ofthe members left their hereditary strong holds, which
however can have happened but seldom. One who is carrying on an inquiry
into the history of the constitutions during the middle ages, ought not to over­
look the hint contained in the circumstance, which assuredly is not mere
chance, thatin Schweitz the estatesmen, at Florence, and also at Naples, ~he
. burghers, were at first divided into four parts; to which afterward, in the
former case owing to the enlargement of the territory, in the latter to that of
the city, two others were added; as the third tribe was at Rome. Ditmarsh
too was divided into four D<I'jfte: the Strandmen never formed one.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 317

when an i~ferior franchise was established in the place they had

previously occupied, all such as appeared to deserve it, and even

whole districts at once, might be elevated from this and admitted

· into the plebeian tribes, and that patricians themselves could enter

into them.
Every locaf tribe had a region corresponding to it97° ; and all the
free substantial members of the Roman state, not included in the
houses, who were dwelling within the limits of any region when
the constitution was introduced, were registered as its tribesmen.
The region bore the name of the tribe71 ; whether it was in the city,
or in the country. In the former, until Augustus divided the city
according to its increased size, and the exigencies of his time into a
greater number of regions, the four established by Servius were
retained: they answered to the four civic tribes7 2 : and with regard
to these there is no difference of opinion. As to the number of re­
gions however into which the Roman territory was parcelled out at
the establishment of the plebeians as an estate, and consequently
as to the number of plebeian tribes originally instituted, Dionysius
found totally contradictory statements : and Livy must have held
the difficulty to be completely inexplicable; so that he. confined
himself to mentioning the civic tribes, and that too in such a man­
ner, as if none but these had been established by Servius. When
in the Annals for the year 259 he found, and himself copied, the

970 See the passage of Lrelius Felix quoted above in note 967; and that
of Varro below in note 974.
71 Livy xxv1. 9. In Pupiniam dimisso exercitu. See also the explanations
of the names of the tribes in Festus.
72 Three of these answerecleach to one ofthe three original towns, the
commonalty of each of which accordingly formed a tribe: with regard to the
Palatine and Colline this is clear: in the Suburan region the most prominent
feature was the Crelian hill, as Varro says de L. L. iv. 8. The rank of these
however was the reverse of that of the patrician tribes: the commonalty of
the Luceres became the first, that of the Ramnes the third; for which assuredly
there was a reason. The Esquiline seems also to have belonged to the liber­
ties of Lucerum; but the settlement upon it is described as formed by genu­
ine plebeians, whether by the Latins and Hernicans in the time of Tullus (see
Festus v. Septimontio), or whether it was founded by Servius: it lay however
within his pomrnrium, and consequently was comprehended within the cere­
monial worship of the patricians, and like the other three civic tribes stood on
a less honourable footing. Thus the number seven, which is perpetually re­
curring in the, local division of the city, (see above n. 934), we again find here
within the pomrnrium of Servi us: three districts are counted twice over, once
for the patricians, the other time for the plebeians; the seventh was a mixed
district, being also the site of the Vic us Patricius.
 318 HISTORY OF ROME.

statement that tbe tribes were now augmented to one and twenty,
he probably assumed, if he took any thought about earlier times,
that Servius had divided the Roman territory into sixteen regions.
Before his time a better informed person, even Cato himself, had
left this point equally undetermined: and the cause of his doing so
is plainly, that a greater number than twenty seemed irreconcilable
with that of the year 259, which was placed beyond dispute by the
subsequent gradual increase; while his good sense and honesty
would not allow l1im to assert that twenty was the original number,
in direct opposition to the older Annals, and doubtless also to 1he
books of the augurs and pontiffs. How the tribes increased from
twenty upward was to be found related everywhere; and Venno­
nius, who ascribed the establishment of the whole five and thirty
to Servius, is a person almost utterly unknown, and betrays unp:;.­
ralleled ignorance and carelessness. · ·
But Dionysius quotes a statement from Fabius, that Servius liad
divided the Roman territory into Bix and twenty regions; so that
with the four civic ones there would have been thirty, and the same
number of tribes 97 8 : and that this singular account in, Dionysius
may be depended upon, is attested by a fragment of Varro, wherein
some person, not named, is said to have apportioned land around
the city to the free citizens in six and twenty regions 74 ; which
surely can only refer to Servius Tullius and his tribes. Now every
973 The passage of Dionysius (rv. 15,) is so important and in such com­
plete disorder, that I will transcribe it as it ought to be written, at the same
time justifying my corrections. A1fo,, J's""').,.,;, ;x.t>iptt.v :.71'ct.11'a.v, "',uh <11rt.fj16,
~)Jf1'11 .;, µolpd.C Ee x.eel t7x.oa-1r, a.fie x.a.l a.iJ'Td.' Xd..AE'i <f'U/i..ti.,, x.xl 'Td.C d.7TIX.d.C
?tf011''Tl91lc rJ.iJ.,.a.ic <ri'T<rtt.pe1.c, <rp1d.11.ona. <j>u11.a.c e71'l TuMlou <ra.c ?ta.11'ctc ')-1vfrSa.1
A!j181· ~' 'f'pta.x.avTrL <;>uAr£c· ~ frrrs fru., rra.7c
1
ti OUovt.fviot icr'1"6pnx.ev, &le µlco x.a.l
tic ~µ;c U7Z't.tpx_,aUfrt.tC trp1ci.x.01rrd.
xa.'Td. 7r01'.t'I oUfrettc ix.7Z'&?T>..11pr.;'<TBeu 'TGtC £T1 x.ctl
ioct.) ?Tiv'Tt<j>ull.ct.•. Kct.'Tt»V µino1,'ToU'Tt»V <iµ<j>o'l'ip(.f)Y «;1o?tll1''TO'T•poc ,,,·v, ou;x, op{~u
'l't»Y µ01p(.f)V.,.6, d.p19µ6v. Instead of copying the passage from the printed text
for the reader to compare the two, it is enough to refer to it; and I need only
remark, that I have inserted the addition found in the manuscript of Bessa­
rion, which is probably contained in all the others; and that the change I
have made is confined to transposing the words, except the omission of l<a.l
before <rp1a.11.01'Ta.. The emendation suggested by Sigonius transposes two
clauses; mine in fact only one: and his would force us to substitute l>h·(.f)'
for 11.1,,11. The whole corruption arose from the words Ka.'!". µ. <r. eiµ<j>. hav­
ing been forgotten, and then added in the margin; but as this would not hold
the four words, the last was written above the other three: hence the next
scribe who replaced the passage in the text, but in the wrong place, thought
tt.µ<j>•Topaiv was to stand first.
74 Varro de vita pop. Rom. r. p. 240, from Nonius Marcellus c. r. v. viri­
tim. Extra urbem in regiones xxvr agros viritini liberis attribuit.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 319

one will perceive the striking internal probability that the number
of plebeian tribes should be thirty; because the patricians and the
Latins, between whom the plebs i;:tood as an intermediate body
uniting the two, were both divided into thirty corporations: nay this
probability is so great, that, if no statement of the kind were pre­
served, and we were only left without any thing to contradict this
number, analogy would lead us to take it for granted. The sole
objection is, that, at the admission of the Crustumine tribe, the num­
ber then existing was only twenty.
This difficulty may be solved by considering that there was an
essential and necessary correspondence between the regions and
the tribes: and as the registering or the assigning landed property
within any district formed the groundwork of a local tribe; and
voting by regions was the same with voting by plebeian tribes; so
likewise a tribe mu'st have ce11sed to exist, when the state was com­
pelled to give up the region that was its basis. The Eleans for
instance had tw,elve phyles: but when they lost a part of their ter­
ritory to the Arcadians, along witli the demes comprised in it, the
number of phyles left was only eight 975 • That the Romans in the
treaty with Porsenna were forced to cede the territory on the Etrus­
can bank of the Tiber is acknowledged; and I shall show how
utterly destitute of historical foundation is the tale of its being re­
stored to them by an act of romantic generosity. Now we fre­
quently find, both in the legends of the oldest times and in the more
genuine history of Rome, that a vanquished people was compelled
to give up a third part of its territory to the conqueror: if such was
the measure adopted by Porsenna with regard to Rome, it would
explain how it came to pass that just a third of the original tribes
disappears7 6 , Had the Annals confessed ,this diminution, the lm­
miliation and fall of Rome would have been manifest in its whole

975 Pausanias Eliac, 1. c. ix. These local tribes in Elis are an instance
of the manner in which a rustic population grew in time to form a common­
alty, and the commonalty united into one people with the citizens. During
the Peloponnesian war the sovereignty still belonged to the city of Elis, and
the neighbouring country was in a state of dependence. It is also remarkable
enough, that afterward, just at a time too of the greatest distress, the senseless
oligarchs strove again to rob the inhabitants of the country of the rights that
had been conceded to them.
76 See below notes 10£)3. 1215. 12'2"2. Those who lost their property in
consequence would be admitted into other tribes, if they removed to Rome:
if they staid on their land, they became aliens to Rome and clients to the new
lords of the soil: as the Irish became farmers of the estates which had been
the property of their forefathers.
320 HISTORY OF ROME.
extent; and the empty fable of the speed with which it recovcretl
from its misfortune would have been laitl bare977,
It is worthy of remark that these tribes do not correspond in num­
ber with the tribes of the patricians, but with their subdivisions, the
curies: this leads us to question whether their name may not ori­
ginally have been a different one, and whether ten of them were
not requisite to make up a plebeian tribe; so that at first there would
be three. such, which subsequently sank to two. This conjecture
is favoured by our finding that the commonalty at the Crustumine
secession had two tribunes to direct it; and that afterward, when
the consular power was transferred to military tribunes chosen out
of the two or<lers, their regular number seems properly to have
been six, three for the patricians according to their tribes, an<l three
in like manner for the plebeians. Ilut in this latter case the inten­
tion may only .have been that, ·the number of the patricians being
given, they should have an equal number of plebeian colleagues:
and in the former, since twenty were too many to guide a people
in a state of insurrection, as well as for taking prudent counsel, each
decury of the tribunes may have appointetl a delegate: indeed why
should not they, like the decuries of the senators, have had each
a leader, who was to come forward on such occasions? In fact
there is an express statement that the plebs at the second secession
had twenty tribunes divided into two decnries, who had io appoint

977 It will not be a waste oflabour to determine what were the tribes that.
remained out of the original thirty. The four civic ones according to their
rank were the Supuran, the Esquiline, the Colline, and the Palatine: the rus­
tic tribes arranged alphabetically were the lEmilian, Camilian, Cluentian,
Cornelian, Fabian, Galerian, Horatian, Lemonian, Menenian, Papirian, ];'upi­
nian, Romilian, Sergian, Veturian, Voltinian: the complement of sixteen was
made up by the Claudian. Not that there was a Claudian tribe from the be­
ginning; but I must here anticipate the conjecture that it was substituted in
the room of a Tarquinian tribe, which, like the Tarquinian house, was done
away with: see the text to note 1236. '.fhe Crustumine is indeed older than
all that were constituted after 259: but since it differs from all the rustic
tribes in this list both in the termination of its name and in that name being
a. local one, it must no doubt have been the twenty-first, which was established
after the treaty with Latium,-the first of a new order of things, by which the
ten lost tribes were to be replaced. The Pollian is without doubt the same
with the Poblilian, one of the later tribes; just as mollia and mobilia are the
same word-oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu: pilentis matres in molli­
bus-otherwise there would have been thirty-six, instead of thirty-five. For
a Veientine tribe the only authority is a corrupt reading, which has now been
expunged on the authority of the good manuscripts, in the speech pro Plancio
16(38); where the right word is Ufcntina.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 321

two chiefs978 • The votes of the curies being those which wer~ told
in the assembly*, the tribes of Romulus had sunk into insignifi­
cance; nor do we meet among the Latins with any trace of a divi­
sion standing higher in the scale than that into thirty towns.
A phyle must needs have a phylarch, and so must a tribe
have a tribune: if Dionysius con.fines his statement to the civic
tribes, when he says that Servius appointed a tribune over each of
them to inspect the condition of every household, and that troops
and taxes were levied according to the same division7 9 , his sole
reason for this limitation is that he knew not what to make of the
rustic tribes. This charge of inspecting, making inquires, and re­
porting, was repugnant to the spirit of later ages, which, as the pe­
culiarities of character became more varied, needed and exacted a
larger scope of freedom: but it was only !his portion of the tribunes
office that became extinct; the tribuni :erarii who lasted until the
end of the republie, seem to have been merely the successors of
the original tribunes. When the Roman people had become ex­
empted from all taxes, the main part of their business as collectors
was at an end: but they continued to exist, and to have an oath
administered to them, and they were called by the Aurelian law to
the exercise of judicial functions, as representing the body of the
most respectable citizenst.
That these tribes at first comprised only the plebeians, and that
the patricians and their clients were not.enrolled in them till much
later, will be made to appear in the sequel of this history. For
the present I will remind the reader that the assembly of the tribes
was the scene where the tribunes of the people were supreme; that
it was never convoked by a patrician magistrate; that, when it met,
the patricians and clients had to withdraw from the forum: that the
centuries were instituted to mediate between the two bodies and to
unite them, and so would otherwise have been needless. True, it
is stated that the Claudian tribe was formed by the clients of that
house: but in the first place this is very far from certain; and
besides it would not have been a greater deviation from the princi­

978 Livy m. 51. Decem numero tribunos militares (this is an accidental

mistake) creant in Aventino-lcilius eundem numerum ab suis creandum
curat.-Viginti tribunis militum negotium dederunt, ut ex suo numero duos
crearent.
* Above p. 254.
79 Dionysius 1v. 14. 'Ht-iµov«> lcp' i1ti.-'1'n> ,;.,,.,J.i~:1.1, C:,'.-,,.,p cpv1.i.px,ou,;
o1~ 'll'potri'Ta.~o 1iJ'Evr:1.1 ':f'of1v oixlr.o fz~tT11"0(' ol1ul.
t See Duker on the Epitome of Livy xcvu.

J.-<N

322 HISTORY OF ROME.

ples of the constitution, than the receiving the Claudii among the
patricians, that is, into the three tribes, instead of the exiled house
of the Tarquins. The establishment of that tribe may perhaps
have been an experiment whether the ten that were extinct could
not be gradually replaced by new ones f?rmed out of the clientry*.
· I will here meet an objection, which might possibly be raised, at
least some time or other hereafter, by a vigilant reader. So long as
it had never been questioned that these tribes were a general division
of the whole nation, as those of Romulus were also supposed to
have been previously ; nor moreover that the houses were families
according to our notions ; every one who remarked that some of the
tribes, the .lEmilian, Cornelian, Fabian, bore the well known names
of the most eminent partrician houses, thought no doubt that this
must be owing to their having had the honour of containing such a
house along with its clients. To me this circumstance rather seems
to explain how the names of the houses themselves originated. An
Athenian of the .lEantid phyle did not believe himself to be de­
scended from Ajax; or a Formian from 1Emilus: these were only
eponyms, honoured by the tribesmen as their common guardian
spirits. Just as little can the Crecilii, so lo)lg as the original idea
was not utterly lost sight of, have carried back their pedigree to
Creculus, the Fabii to a Fabus or Fabius, the Julii to Iulus. Wher­
ever a house and a tribe bore the same name, it may b'e assumed
that both wer:i so called in the same manner after the same indiges;
and that both performed sacrifices to him, as to a patron of a higher
order 980 •
That the tribes of Servi us .were plebeian8 1, is proved at least in
substance by Varro's connecting their institution with the assign·
See the text to note 123G.
980 Such is Clausus in Virgil, lEn. vu. 707: Claudia nurtc a quo diffun­
ditur et tribus et gens Per Latium : he is no more the progenitor of the one
than of the other. Such accurate information does Virgil display even on
this point. Much of what he gathered together after the manner of the Al­
exandrian poets, from regions seldom visited, passes for his arbitrary inven­
tion, and as such is even censured as faulty. When he introduces the
eponyms of the Sergian and Cluentian~ tribes among the Trojan followers of
lEneas (v. 121-123), and thus revives the recollection of an ancient belief,
which it is likely he may have met with in Nrevius, a reader of the present
day fancies he meant to pay a stupid compliment to some Sergius and Cluen­
tius; men of high rank; though no such names are to be found among the
persons of influence in his day.
81 The abstract substantive from plebs is plebitas, .or, according to the
old spelling, pll"nitas, which Nonius quotes as ttsed by Cato and Cassius lle­
mina: De hon. vet. dictis.
 llISTORY OF ~OME. 323
ment of landed property. The nature of the right to enjoy the
profits of the national domains by possession, and of the right to an
assignment of property therein, requires to be separately and fully
developed. For the present I will merely obser\'e, that the for;ncr
originally belonged to the patricians, who after receiving lands in­
vested their clients with them; the latter exclusiw·ly to the ple­
beians: that, in other words, with the exception of the country
under the city walls, all landed property, strictly speaking, was in
the hands of the plebeians alone: that all the assignments of land
were in their favour, and were a set-off for their share in the public
domains; that consequently, where general assignments of land are
spoken of, they are almost always expressly mentioned as the re·
ceivers; and that, where this is not the case, the same restriction
must assuredly have existed 982 • The earlier assignments to the
freemen, such as are ascribed to the Sabine kings, Numa and Ancus,
had recognized the rights of men belonging to a commonalty which
had not yet assumed the form of an estate; and by the assignment
under Servius the plebs was established in its distinctive character
of free hereditary proprietors.
From this time forward the Roman nation consisted of the two
·estates, the populus, or body of burghers,. and the plebs, or com­
monalty: both, according to the views of the legislator, equally free,
but differing in degree of honour: the patricians, as elder brothers,
and moreover as each of them was the member of a far less nu­
merous body, had the advantage of the plebeians, as the greater
houses had of the lesser. I do not aim at prying into the mysteries
of the ancient theologies; thus much however is evident: that the
Romans conceived every part of nature and enry vital and spiritual
power to be divided into two sexes anu two persons; they had
tellus and tellumo, anim.a and animus; and in like manner they
probably also looked upon the nation as consisting of populus and
plebes: hence the names are masculine and feminine. The use of
the former word for the sovereign assembly of the centuries b~longs
to later; for the whole nation, to yet more recent times: and along

982 Dionysius speaks of a twofold assignment under Servius; one just at

the beginning of his reign; and another after the close of the Etruscan war,
which he represents to have lasted twenty years, out of the conquered terri­
tory. Livy, who was not disturbed by any feeling that it was necessary for
him to fill up the wearisome period of forty-four years by recording the events
of each, despatches the Etruscan war in a fow words, before he comes to the
establishment of the centuries; and thf>n (e. 4G) he JnPntions the only assign­
rnent of which ht> t.akt>s any noticl'.
3U HISTORY OF ROME.
wi.th the second meaning the original one long continued to prevail.
It is related under the year 341 that the plebs, with the concurrence
of the populus, committed the charge of investigating the murder of
Postumius to the consuls: in this place no interpretation can att~ch
that meaning to the word into which it has been attempted, though
very mistakenly, to strain it in the saying of Appius Claudius, that
the tribunes were magistrates of the plebs, not of the populus;
where it is contended that populus means the people in the centu­
ries988.
Even in the oracle of the Marcii, which was promulgated during
the second Punic war, the prretor is still spoken of as pronouncing
the supreme sentence of the law both over the burghers and the
commonalty84 • Again, a concilium, as we know from a very good
authority, was the assemblage of a mere part of the nation 85 ; not
of the whole, as it was united in the centuries. Now Livy says,
the auguries had attained to such high honour, that the concilia po­
puli and the centuriate comitia were dissolved in consequence of
unfavourable omens 86 • Here the concilia populi, which from their
very name must have been distinct from· the only general comitia,
those of the centuries, or the exercitus, are over and above this ex­
pressly named alongside of them: and a concilium plebes is out of
the question; for this did not stand under the influence of the au­
guries. So that a concilium populi is equivalent to an assembly of
the patricians or the curies. Such was the concilium to which
Publicola paid homage by lowering his fascess7: such was the
assembly that decided between the Aricines and the Ardeates con·
cerning the territory 88 they were disputing about: besides as the
patricians as then were still the only possessors of the domains, the
plebs was in no way qualified for judging whether a particular dis·
trict belonged to them; nor would it have had any interest to decide
unfairly ; nor finally would the consuls have granted it the honour of
settling a quarrel between two foreign towns. If we keep this ex·

983 Livy iv. 51. A plebe consensu populi consulibns negotium mandatur.
n. 56. Non populi sed plebis magistratum: that a tribune had no authority
over the patricians. · For that was the point in dispute.
84 Livy xxv. 12. Prretor-is qui populo plebique jus dabit summum.
85 Lrelius Felix in Gellius xv. 27. Is qui non universum populum, sed
partem aliquam adesse jubet, non comitia, sed concilium edicere debet.
86 Livy 1. 36. Ut-concilia populi, exercitus vocati, summa. rerum, ubi
aves non admisissent, dirimerentur.
87 See below note 1172.
88 Livy 111. 71. Concilio populi a magistratibus dato.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 325
planation steadily in view, we perceive it was by the curies that M.
Manlius, the saviour of the Capitol, the patron of the Roman com­
monalty, was condemned to death, after the centuries had acquitted
him 98 9 : so greedily did the patri.cians thirst after his blood. Their
place of meeting was the Comitium, that of the plebeians the Fo­
rum90. The distinction between the two orders is visible even in
their games; which were twofold, the Roman and the plebeian.
The first were held in the great Circus; and accordingly we are
told the curies had places there assigned to them : the separation
between the orders accounts for the origin and purpose of the Cir­
cus Flaminius. It must have been designe~ for the games of the
commonalty; which in early times chose its tribunes there, on the
Flaminian field9t,
Now as the Marcii designated the nation by the two words popu­
lus and plebs, so the formularies of prayer by which all proceedings
in the presence of the whole nation were opened, sometimes made
mention of the Quirites, sometimes of the plebeians, along with the
populus 9 ~. It is true, the original Quirites were totally and essen­
tially different from the plebeians, and were become a part of the
patricians : but the plebeians were now standing in the same rela­
lation to the collective body of the curies, in which the second tribe
had once stood to the first: the formulary was ready at hand, and

989 Livy v1. 20. Cum centuriatim populus citaretur-apparuit-nunquam

fore-crimini Iocum. lta-concilium populi indictum est. The true account
is clearly that the duumvirs impeached him.
90 Both of these lay on the same level-qti.anto rostra foro et comitio
superiora sunt, says Fronto ad Antonin. Aug. 1. 2. p. 148. ed. Rom.-and
were so situate as to form a whole, which in common parlance was called the
Forum: it was this Forum, in the wider acceptation of the word, that "'as sur­
rounded by porticoes. The original plebeian Forum was paved with flag­
stones oftravertinec the Comitium is the piece of g.round where a pavement
of flagstones of giallo was brought to light by the excavations of the last cen­
tury. They were separated by the ancient rostra, a stage of considerable
length with steps at each end of it, lying in the line between the temple of
Castor and the Curia Hostilia, at right angles to the front of this Curia
and the steps before it. Down to the time of Caius Gracchus even the tri­
bunes in speaking used to front the Comitium: he turned his back to it, and
spoke with his face toward the Forum. •
91 All such distinctions necessarily came to an end, when the patricians
were lost in the body of the nation like a ,drop in the sea.
92 Quod felix, faustum, fortunatum, salutareque sit popvlo Romano Qui­
ritibus (not Quiritium: see above p. 224, not 752). Festus v. Dici mos erat
Romanis in omnibus sacrificiis precibusque. Cicero paraphrases this as fol­
lows : Qure deprecatus sum-ut ea res--popvlo plebi'[Ue RomanOJ bene atque
feliciter eveniret. Pro Murena 1.
326 HISTORY OF ROME.

was applicable : hence the custom of addressing the assembly in

the Forum by the name of Quirites : hence the phrase, Quiritary
property, and the like99 3 ,
Among the measures ofServius for promoting freedom, it is further
stated that he established judges for private actions 94 • I entertain
no doubt that this refers to the institution of the centumvirs. The
only ground for the prevalent notion that this tribunal was not
erected until the five. and thirty tribes were completed, or till there
were at least three and thirty, lies in its name: whereas, the agree­
ment being only approximate, this is a sufficient sign that the name
arose out of common ,parlance, and was not the original technical
appellation. For every tribe there were three judges. This num­
ber,-the principle of representing the particular tribes, and the
consequent practice for the election to be conducted by each seve­
rally, not by the collective commonalty,-the symbol of the spear,­
all point to very old times:. the symbol just mentioned.contains an
allusion to the plebeians as Quirites, that name being frequently
derived from the Sabine word quiris, a spear. Moreover the
causes which came before this court, referred uniformly to matters
that occurred in the census, or concerned Quiritary property •. The

993 At the close of this inquiry 1 must add one more remark. A great
number of instances may be collected by merely turning over the pages of
Livy, where he gives the name of populus to the plebs;: but these are not of
the slightest importance, if we make a distinction between the strict practice
of the language in ancient times, which he retained in copying from such
Annals as still paid attention to it, and the fluctuating usage which he shared
with his own age. How difficult would it have been for him to avoid this!
when the tribunes, who had already long been actually tribunes of the people,
had for some hundred years at the least transacted business officially with the
populus of that age, the comitia of the centuries. But thi11 only makes us the
more struck with the precision of those passages where he is literally reciting
the expressions of the older writers. I will however myself quote another
passage, which might seem to make against me. Varro de Re rust. I. 2. 9.
Licinius trib. pl. cum esset, post regesexactosannis cccLxv,primus populum
ad leges accipiendas in septem jugera forensia e comitio eduxit. The number
of years, as every one sees, is corrupt, and perhaps the corruption has gone
further: but if any one takes populus here. to mean plebs, and the comitium to
be lts place of assembly, he is totally in the dark. In this very passage the
populus is the curies, who were forced to accept the law proposed by the tri­
umphant plebeians, (leges accipere): the tribune conducts them from the
Comitium to the spot where they are to conclude peace with the plebs: the
seven jugers are the condition: in septem jugera: like pax• data in has !eges
est: Livy xxx111. 30.
!14 Dionysius 1v. 2.'>
 IIISTORY OF ROME. 327
one senatorian judge, who was appointed by the prretor, was pro­
perly called an arbiter 995 : the centumvirs, we are perfectly justified
in assuming, originally when they were ninety, and afterward as
their number, which on. the diminution of the tribes had been re- .
duced to sixty, gradually increased again, bore the name ofjudices.
And the unprejudiced will easily see that these are the judices who
after the abolition of the decemvirate were protected along with the
other plebeian magistrates by the laws declaring them inviolable 96 •
Beside the election of these judges :ind of the tribunes, several
others may have been carried on by the plebeians collectively, or
by the particular tribes separately. It is assuredly more probable
that even in those times they had rediles, forming a peculiar local
magistracy, such as we may suppose to have subsisted in the towns
the inhabitants of which belonged to the plebs, than that this office
originated later. The plebeian assemblies may also have had a
variety of purposes over and above elections ; the passing resolu­
tions, the imposing rates for common objects: thus general contri­
butions for the funerals of favourite statesmen were ordained by
public decree 97. \Ve may assume however that even then they
had rights which came much nearer to their subsequent power.
For the legislation of an individual who is·the supreme head of a
state, pursues a different course from that taken by conflicting powers
in a free state; where, without violating the public peace and the
forms of law, nothing but graduaf concessions can be wrung, some­
times by lulling fears, sometimes by rousing them, from the pos­
sessors of privileges that have become exorbitant, above all when
their sway is a usurpation. The royal author of that constitution

!)!)5 Plautus Rudens III. 4. 7. Ergo dato De senatu Cyrenensi quemvis

opulentum arbitrum, Si tuas esse oportet etc. 150 years afterward it was a
matter of. dispute whether judcx or arbiter were the right name. Cicero pro
Murena 12. (27). The nature of the relation between them had been totally
forgotten. .
DG Livy III. 55. That ingenious scholar Ant. Augustinus, who in his
views on historical questions was mostly no less happy, than he invariably
was the contrary in emendatory criticism, discerned this truth: but he only
gave a faint hint of his opinion, and so his conjecture did not meet with ac­
ceptance. (See Drakenborch on the passage referred to). He would have
had to fetch his readers from a vast distance, out of a public still far behind
in its nonage, and to carry them up to the point where he was standing: the
road to it was not levelled: and after all would they have thanked him for it?
Might he not be satisfied with having found his way thither himself?
97 For that of Agr. Menenius it was proposed by the tribunes. Dionysius
VJ. 00.
 328 HISTORY OF ROME.
which posterity· designated with the name of Servi us TulliusD98,
cannot have understood the nature of his own measures, if, after
establishing the plebeian estate, he left it so destitute of protection
as it was before the Secession, and so far from an equality of rights
as it still continued long after. Cicero wa~ not speaking inconsi·
derately, nor did he so much transport himself to the point of view
taken by a different party, as draw back that curtain of prejudices
through which he usually esteemed it his duty to look into the
sanctuary of the constitution, when he declared that the plebs by
the Secession recovered its hallowed rights, its liberties 99 • The
measure by. which they were secured was new, and was the result
of necessity, owing to the change in the form of the constitution:
but of the rights themselves the commonalty cannot have been des­
titute. It would not have been a free body, like the body of bur·
ghers, unless there had been the same right of appealing to its
assembly, which the patricians had of appealing to the curies; and
unless it had been entitled to pass sentence upon such as grossly
infringed its libert~es.
That the counter-revolution of L. Tarquinius and the patricians
did actually drive back the commonalty so far from the fair rights
it had reached, that centuries were needed before it could again
make its way against wind and tide into the harbour where after
that royal legislation it was lying, is evinced among other instances
by the state of the law concerning debts. '\Ve are distinctly told
that a law of king Servius abolished the practice of pledging the
person, and substituted that of pledging property 1000 : the selfsame
measure by which the Pretelian law made a new epoch in the free­
dom of the plebs. It is further said, that this beneficent enactment
was repealed by Tarquinius the tyrant! ; and the patricians con­

998 Ut, quemadmodum Numa divini auctor juris fuisset, ita Servium
conditorem omnis in civitate discriminis, ordinumque-posteri fama ferrent.
Livy1. 42.
99 Ut leges sacratas sibi restitueret. Fragm. of the Corneliana. Sacro­
sanctus answers. to the Germanf1·on.
1000 Dionysius 1v. 9. "ouot J" .;,, µ•-ra. 'Ta.iiTa. J11,vefuD1Jv'T11,1, 'Tou'Tov' oU,.
'd,l}'DIJ 11'f0' "'"' XfEd, t.l.7l'd,°)'&1T611,1, t.l.AAt.l. ""'' voµov 9>iuoµ11,t p.HdEV<t. J11,vei!:;m .,,.,
uoJµ11,u" h1v6ipo", ;,.11,vov ii/'oilµtV•' 'role J11,rnu,,.11,'ic "'"'' .;,,;11,, 'rDIJP uiJµ~"-A">-•µ­
' 111v xp<1.T1'ir. In the same harimgue he makes Servius further say, that the
domains should not thenceforward be .possessed by the usurping patricians,
but by the plebeians who had won them with their blood. So that the agrarian
law was likewise referred to tho same founder of every constitutional right.
1 Dionysius 1v. 43. Tarquinius is even said to have destroyed the ta­
bles on which these beneficent laws were written. These then must have
 HISTORY OF ROME. 329

trived to prevent its renewal for two hundred years after the ban­
. ishment of the kings.
The story that Servius meant to resign the throne, and have an­
nual consuls elected, may have as insecure a historical foundation
as the tale of his birth: nevertheless it points decidedly to a neces·
sary connexion which common tradition and opinion perceived be­
tween the consulate and the laws bearing his name. This is dis·
tinctlyimplied in Livy's statement that the first consuls were chosen
in conformity to the· commentaries of king Servius Tullius; those
commentaries, which contained a detailed scheme of his constitu­
tion, as the quotations in Festus show. And since one is unwill­
ing to suspect that the author of so great a legislation, who had the
power to fashion it for his purposes, would do any thing that must
have· destroyed it; the design of that legislator whom we call Ser­
vius Tullius, must have been, it would seem, to place the two free
states on a level in the consulate as well as elsewhere, in the man­
ner in which it was effected by the election of J,. Brutus, and per­
manently by the law of C. Licinius and L. Sextius. If he did not,
if he only created two annual magistracies for the houses, and left
the commonalty without any consul from its own body, it was in
a worse condition than under a single supreme head who retained
his functions for life : the latter would emancipate himself, and the
longer he reigned the more so, from the prejudices of the order out
of which he too had proceeded; prejudices by which an annual
magistrate would continue to be fettered. And by no gain save
that of universal freedom could the palpable mischievous conse­
quences of a divided government be counterbalanced.

been the fift; spoke~ of in 1v. 13, the mode of mentioning which(:"""') im­
plies that they were no longer in existenc;e, and accordingly were not com­
prehended in the Papirian collection. If this was digested under the second
'l'arquinius, of course it did not contain the laws which he rescinded: their
not being found in it is assuredly the only ground for the above mentioned
story of his having destroyed them in a fit of passion. From this however it
ensues that the whole account of that law on debts has nothing but tradition
to rest upon. See the text to note 1264.

J,-RR
 . I

THE CENTURIES.

WITH regard to the purpose of the Servian constitution to im·

part an equal share in the 'consular· government to the plebeians,
every one is at liberty to think as he likes: that it granted them the
right of taking part in elections and in legislation, is universally
acknowledged.
Servius, as for the sake of brevity I ·will call the lawgiver in
accordance with the writers of antiquity, would have taken the
simplest method of bestowing these rights, if he had adopted the
same plan whereby the commons in feudal states obtained a station
alongside of the barons, and had ordained that all national concerns
should be brought both before the council of the burghers and that of
the commonalty, and that the decree of the one should not have force
without the approval of the other, and should be made null by its
rejection. This was the footing on which the plebeian tribes in
after times stood in relation to the curies: but if these two bodies
had been set up over against each other from the beginning, they
would have rent the state asunder: to accomplish the perfect union
of which the centuries were devised by Servius. For in them he
collected the patricians and their clients together with the plebe·
ians; and along with all these that new class of their fellow-citizens
which had arisen from bestowing the' Roman franchise on, the in·
habitants of other towns, the municipals : so that nobody could in
any way look upon himslf as a Roman, without having some place
or other, though indeed it might often be a very insignficant one,
in this great assr.mbly 1009• The preponderance, nay the whole
power in that assembly lay with the plebs: this however excited
no ill will, because no one was excluded; and provoked no oppo·
sition, because it did not decide by itself, but stood on an equipoise
with the curies.

1002 Comitia.tus ma.ximus.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 331

This institution of the centuries has thrown that of the tribes

completely into the shade ; and through the former alone has the
name of king Servius maintained its renown to our day. More­
over it has long and universally been held to be a settled point,
that this is understood with more certainty and accuracy than any
other part of the Roman constitution; because it is described by
Dionysius and Livy, and that description is couched in numbers:
and only a very few, who saw more clearly, have ventured to pro­
nounce, that at all events the.se representations were not suited to
the times of which we have a contemporary history. At present
this in the main is no longer contested ; and, a far more authentic
record having come to light, the errors common to the two his­
torians, and those peculiar to each, may be satisfactorily pointed
out. They cannot either of them have been acquainted with the
account contained in the commentaries which were ascribed to the
king himself, but have written from very different and very defec­
tive reports: as to Cicero, the only reason that indisposes us to
believe his having drawn immediately from the authentic source,
is, that erudition of this sort was not in his way; else his state­
ments are exceedingly accurate and trustworthy. The mistakes
of the two historians need not surprise us; for they were not speak­
ing of an institution still existing, nor even of one that had been
recently changed, but of what had long passed away. · Livy says
expressly, that it had nothing in common with the constitution of
the centuries in his days : and this moreover is the very reason
why he describes it, as he does the ancient tactics in his account of
the Latin war. Various other statements too must have been current,
containing still greater discrepancies; for Pliny takes 110,QOO
ases to be the limit for the property of the first class, Gellius
125,000 1008 ; numbers, which can neither be regarded as blunders
in the manuscripts, nor as slips in the writers.
In one point both the historians are mistaken : confounding the
burghers with the commonalty, they imagine that a people, in
which till then perfect union and equality had prevailed, was now
divided into classes according to property, in such a manner that
all the power fell into the hands of the rich, though incumbered
with no slight burthens. Dionysius adds. another error to this, in
looking upon the eighteen equestrian centuries, which had the first
rank in the constitution of Servius, as a timocratical institution.
The principle of an aristocracy is to maintain a perfect equality

1003 Pliny H. N. xxmi. 13. Gellius vu. 13.

 332 HISTORY OF ROME.

within its own body. The poorest and obscurest nobile of Venice,
into who~e family no office of dignity had come for centuries, was
esteemed in the great council as the equal of those whose wealth
and name encircled them with splendour. A government formed
like the Roman by a large body of houses is a complete democracy
within itself, just as much so as that of a canton where the popu­
lation is not more numerous: an aristocracy it is solely in its rela­
tion to the commonalty. This was misunderstoocl by Dionysius
:md Livy: no change was made by Servius in this equality of the
ancient burghers : his timocracy only affected those who stood
entirely without the pale of that body, or those who at the utmost
were attached to it, but far from partaking in the same equality.
The six equestrian centuries established by L. Tarquinius were
incorporated by Servius into his comitia; and received the name of
the six sujfragia: so that these comprised all the patricians; among
whom it cannot be conceived that in this constitution, any more
than in the earlier, there existed any distinction adapted to the scale
of their property. Livy, though he forgot that the six centuries
had been instituted by Tarquinius, makes a perfectly correct dis­
tinction between them and the twelve which were added by Ser­
vius1004; out of the principal men in the state,. as he says: he ought
to have said, in the commonalty: for the patricians were in the six
sujfragia, nor can any of them have been admitted into the twelve
centuries. Dionysius therefore should have confined himself to
these twelve centuries, when he conceived that the knights were
chosen by Servius out of the richest and most illustrious families;
which notion he extends to all the eighteen5 : for the patricians,
a
who unquestionably as body were the richest as well as the lead­
ing men in the state, had all of them places in the six sujfragia by
birth and descent, though particular individuals among them might
happen to be exceedingly poor. ·
Else it is clear from the character of the measure, that the person
who arranged this division of ranks, when he collected the notables
and separated them from the commonalty, would pass over such of
the nobles of Medullia or Tellena as were totally reduced to poverty

1004 Festus (v. Sex Suffragia) in direct opposition to the truth takes the
six to have been the centuries formed by Servius. To this he was led by the
notion that the twelve had already been instituted by Tarquinius. See above
p. 275 1 note 8!.12.

. 5 IV. 18. 'E,. 'TfOr ix_on,.r 'TO µl)'ltr'TOJ 'Tlµnµd., 1r.i:tl l<d.'Td. )'lvo'

t,,.lq>d.''"'· The passage of Cicero about selecting the knights censu maxima

is mutilate, and cannot be filled up with any certainty.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 333

and insignificance, and would enroll in these centuries such of the
merely freeborn inhabitants as in compliance with the notion of the
class possessed wealth enough to equip a horseman, provided their
honour was untarnished; not those whose character stood the high·
est, if their means were too small. Marius would not have been
placed among the knights: the object of Servius however was not
to bestow prizes on the virtues of individuals, but to establish an
estate in the nation; to unite the plebeian notables with the patri­
cian. Now among the Greeks, wherever the ancient government
did not dwindle into an oligarchy, the tra:nsitioh to that later order
of things which the course of nature brought about, was effected by
the remnant of a decaying aristocracy uniting themselves into one
class with the richer landed proprietors among the commonalty, the
i''"'f<6po1: this class, from being able to defray the expense of serving
as horsemen out of their own means, bore the name of j,,.,,.,7,; which
is best rendered in English by the word knights, although in using
it certain associations must be guarded against. The Greek philo­
sophers, when the ancient notions of ancestry had long been lost,
defined nobility to consist, according to the way of thinking then pre­
valent, of hereditary good birth together with hereditary wealth1006,
Where poverty has intruded, none but a military noblesse, such as
that which several German provinces take pride in, can maintain
the character of the class in public opinion, which alone preserves
it. Nay the privileged classes have universally esteemed wealth,
and the outward splendour that flows from it, as the only thing
which can place any one on a level with themselves. Such has
always been the case. The Heraclid Aristodemus, the progenitor
of the Spartan kings, said, .Money makes the man. Alcreus re­
peated it in his songs, as a saying of the wise7: and bad as this
sounds, bad as it is, still it can no way be disputed that, in an
undertaking like that of king Servius, wealth and not bare lineage
was to be taken as the criterion for the plebeian aristocracy which
was to be established under a new form.
Only we must beware of confounding the first institution with
what took place afterward; as also of supposing that the subsequent
standard of an equestrian fortune, a million ases, is derived from

1006 Aristotle Fro.gm. de Nobilitate.

· 7 Xpilf<<t<r• <tvilp. Alcreus in the Schol. on Pind. lsthm. u. 17. fragm.
50. ed. Matth. Aristodemus said it at Sparta.: so that this tradition, like the
national one in Herodotus (vr. 52.), represented him as not having died until
the conquest was completed.
334 HISTORY OF ROME.
the times of Servius. \Ve cannot suppose that the descendants of
those who were originally enrolled, took their station otherwise
than hereditarily, whether they were plebeians or patricians. Poly­
bius says, at present the knights are chosen according to fortune 1008 :
previously therefore it must have been on another principle; that
is, according to birth : and Zonaras informs us that the censors had
the power of rewarding merit by raising an rerarian into the tribes,
a mere plebeian into the equestrian order; and contrariwise of pun­
ishing a bad life by erasing from both of the two upper ranks 9•
Here the regulative principle is plainly the reverse of one that de­
pends upon property, such as prevailed in later times, when who­
ever could produce his four hundred thousands was entitled to
demand a place among the knights; and the want of a few thou­
sand sesterces, in spite of every virtue, kept a man down amid the
plebs 10• True, the censors in those times ordered an unworthy
possessor of a knight's horse to sell it: this however now formed
the whole of the censorian brand, unless they could also turn down
the tribesmen among the rerarians. Indeed this very power of con­
ferring the privilege of a knight's horse enabled the censors still to
reward civic virtues in individuals : as in Great Britain a general
or admiral who is raised to the peerage, if not wealthy, receives
from the nation a pension suitable to hi~ rank; although, as a body,
the House of Peers can only maintain its station by comprehending
the mass of the great landed proprietors. That the original eques·
trian fortune cannot have amounted as in aftertimes to a million, is
clear: for the classes from the fourth upward ascend by intervals of
25,000; and this would be followed by the enormous leap from a
hundred thousand ases to a million; whereas during the second
Punic war we find this interval subdivided, as was the part of the
scale below a hundred thousand into only two classes. 11 Thus
much may at all events be conjectured: that the obligation of those
who were registered as horsemen to serve as such at their own cost,

1008 Polybius v1. 20. , To"' ;,,,.,,,.,h 'To µiv 1rd.1'.<t101 .:O''Ttpou' i1oi610"1t.P
'""f<d.~tn-Jur If ?rpO'Tlpor", ?rMu'Tmflrr °)'•)'o~µon, .;,,,.a 'Tou .,.,µnou T'ii,
ix>.o)''ii': since fortune has been taken as the standard in choosing them. If
he had not intended to imply a casual connexion here, he would have writ­
ten °)'tr•µtrn', being clwsen according to their fortune.
9 Zonaras vu. 19. E;lir a.il'Toi'-i' 'TM q.uA"-'• xa.l i1 .,.;,, i7t'7t'i.J11.,
ul i, .,.;,, )'•PouO"lr1.1 t)')'pii~uv, Tou' I' oux 1il" ~1o'iwra.' "-71'"-J'T"-,:toBtr i'<t.Atl­
i'll'. '
10 Si quadringentis sex, septem millia desunt, Plebs eris.
11 Livy xnv. 11.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 335

when a knight's horse could not be assigned to them, was deter­

mined by a certain fixed amount of their property; and that, if it
fell short of this, they were bound under the· same circumstances
to enter into the infantry. The former regulation perhaps gave
occasion to the story, in the description of the general zeal to wipe
away the disgrace endured before Veii, that the knights who had
an equestrian fortune and no horse allotted them, volunteered to
serve on horseback at their own expense 1Du; and the latter is alluded
to in the tradition that L. Tarquitius, the friend of the great Cin­
cinnatus, and the bravest of the Roman youth, was compelled by
his poverty to serve on foot 13• The fixing such a sum was a mat­
ter of necessity: from the same reason it was probably altered from
time to time according to the changes in the value of money.
The prevalent opinion, that the equestrian rank from the begin­
ning was essentially connected with great wealth, and yet that all
the knights were furnished with horses by the state, and had a
yearly rent assigned for their keep, not only charges the Roman
laws with absurdity and injustice, but also overlooks Livy's express
remark, which follows close upon his account of the advantages en­
joyed by the knights, that all these burthens were shifted from the
poor upon the. rich14• Would any one indeed answer for it that a
rich patrician, if he might have had his expenses defrayed, would
magnanimously have declined availing himself of this right, for the
benefit of his poorer brother patrician 1 And as for the plebeians,
if they too had a like right granted them by Servius, at all events it
cannot have been exercised for several generatiqns. At first how­
ever no doubt it was one of the patrician privileges: indeed the

1012 Livy v. 7: that is to say, a greater number than had been called out.
13 Livy III. 27. Though this particular instance itself belongs to the
poetical tradition. For Tarquitius was a patrician; and even those who do
not admit the certainty of the hypothesis that a citizen of this order did not
belong to any class, will allow that poverty in this case would either have
entirely excluded him from servillg, or at best would have degraded him into
a class in which his merits would never have been distinguished .
. 14 lime omnia indites a pauperibus inclinata oner&. Dionysius evi·
dently felt the absurdity that results from his representation, and therefore
sacrificed the opportunity, at other times so welcome to him, of deriving Ro­
man institutions from the Greek ; as Polybius would have Jed him to do by his
comparison of the Roman equestrian order with the Corinthian. I say Poly­
bius: for from him must Cicero have borrowed the notice of a circumstance,
which, as showing how widely such institutions were spread n.mong the an­
cients, is extremely interesting: though as a proof of any connexion between
Rome and Corinth it is good for nothing.
 336 HISTORY OF ROME.

incontestable meaning of the account in Cicero, representing this

allowance as an institution of the first L. Tarquinius, is, that its
origin was prior.to the establishment of the commonalty as an estate:
and, if restricted to those among the ruling burghers, who, though
equal to their fellows in rank, were below them in fortune, there
was nothing unfair or oppressive in it.
The sum of ten thousand ases for the purchase of a horse, by the
side of the sums at which oxen and sheep were rated in the table of
penalties*, seems to' be so exorbitant, that the correctness of the
number has been questioned. But in the first place it was not to
be a common nag; and compared with such a one at Rome as else­
where a war-horse was naturally very dear: and besides the equip­
ment was incomplete without at least a groom, a slave, who was to
be bought, and then to be mounted. One should be glad to know
whether the state did not replace such horses at least as were lost
on the field;· whether a horseman who was discharged on account
·of age, or the heirs of a deceased one, had not to pay back the ten
thousand ases that had been received. These are questions tow hich
it is scarcely probable that even a lucky moment of conjecture will
ever divine an answer: but surely I cannot be mistaken in suppos­
ing that, when the censor .commanded a knight to sell rhis horse,
the intention was, that the person thus degraded should refund to
the state the outfit-money which had been advanced to him, and
should procure the means of doing so by that sale : he cannot have
had the right of bargaining with another and entitling him on the
payment of the ten thousand ases to enter in his stead into the receipt
of the annual two thousand, as if it had been a transferable office
or luogo vacabile. For this penal command of the censors continued
in use down to the end of the republic; when the practice had long
been to give the knights pay and fodder in room of that allowance.
This change had already been introduced in the time of Polybius 1015 :
knight's horses furnished by the state are mentioned in inscriptions
under the emperors, as long as the old institutions lasted ; though
certainly it is in a very different sense 14 •

* . See below note 1058.

1015 Polybius VI. 39. 12. 13.

16 Cicero (de Rep. 1v. 2.) alludes to a change made by a decree of the
plebs ordaining that the horses should be restored; for when he makes Scipio
speak of any measure as intended, we are to suppose that it had actually taken
effect, but, according to the information pos5essed by Cicero, was later than
the date he assigns to Scipio's discourse. It is possible that the holders of
the outfit-money were enjoined to pay it into 'the treasury, that a great sum
 HISTORY OF ROME. 337

The form of the equestrian order was determined by that of the

older centuries, which were preserved unaltered as the six sujfra­
gia; and after them were the twelve plebeian centuries modelled.
The centuries of the knights were not connected with the form of
the army; the turms of the cavalry no way corresponded with them:
on the other hand the classes represented an army of infantry, in
exact accord with the constitution of the legion; troops of the line
and light-armed soldiers, with their body of reserve, their carpen•
ters, and thefr band ; and even with the baggage-train.
This exact conformity to the frame of the army was 'peculiar to
this institution, although in many of the Greek states the hoplites
and the full citizens were the same. Nay,the principle also, which
is justly assumed by Dionysius,-that the votes allotted to each
class bore the same proportion to the collective sum of votes,,as the
taxable property of its members bore to the total taxable property
of all the five classes, and that the numbers of the citizens contained
in each stood in an inverse ratio to the numbers that designated
their property,-was not unknown to the Greeks. Aristotle speaks
of votes the weight of which was regulated by the amount of the
property of the voters 101 ~.

might be in hand for largesses: the horses and equipment would have con­
tinued their property. Perhaps too Cicero was mistaken about the date; and the
higher pay mentioned by Polybius, and the fodder, might be meant as a com­
pensation. At all events the inscrip~ions referred to show that the measure
was not permanent. See for instance in Grutur, 404 (3.4.). 407 (6). 415 (3).
1017 Politic. YI. 3. p. 171. ~ul j-«p-oi OAl')'"P):,l1t.ol ('T•UTO J'iJt.«101) OTI
;., J'6~~· 'T~ <JrAtlOVI OU<Tl'1." Jt.<L'Td <Jr°A~a., i'"'P oua-i"" cp<t<rl Jt.pivt<r9<LJ liir. Fur­
ther: ToiiTo 11.upior ;,,.7,,,_071 ,,_·, oi wA<lou, 11.«l ,;, To 7lµnµ« wMlor. If out
of lO rich men and 20 poor, 6 of the rich and 5 of the poor voted on the one
side, 4 of the rich and 15 of the poor on the other, then ~woTIP"'' T~ Tiµ•µ"­
ii11"tfTtlru, a-uv«p19µouµl, ..v clµ,oT•P"' t11.«T¥•"• TouTo 11.up101. He cannot
posssibly have meant individuals here, for this would have led to intermina­
ble calculations,-but vrµµopi«1 '
I must also advert for a moment to the division into classes established by
Solon; for with an apparent likeness to that of Servi us, it has a totally differ­
ent character. The former related wholly to the eligibility to offices, tht>
latter to elections. No comitia according to the four classes were certainly
eve~ held at Athens : but as the archons in old times could only be chosen
out of the first (Plutarch Aristid. c. 1.), and the fourth was excluded from all
offices, so the second' must also have had certain privileges above the third.
In the Attic classes the houses and the commonalty were intermixed, even if
the expression of Demetrius Phalereus quoted in the passage just referred to
--t11. 7,., ,,.,,., 7r.v. 7« µIi''"""- 71µ6µ:t.T« Jt.t1t-rnpsvfl!r-authorize us to con­
clude that among the pentacosiomedimns none but the members of the houses
1.-ss
 338 HISTORY OF ROME.

The ground was laid for Rome to become a warlike state, when
military service and civic rights were connected with the hereditary
landed property of the plebehns: no freeman however was to feel
himself excluded; and those trades which were indispensable to
the army, but which a plebeian was not allowed to carry on, were
in their corporate capacity placed in a station, which was probably
advantageous, and higher than the individuals would have occupied
by the general principles of the census. For this reason the five
classes had the single centuries attached to them.
Scipio in Cicero's dialogue declines entering into a detailed re­
port of the Servian constitution of the centuries, it being a matter
well-known to his friends: in like manner I too may be excused
from countiug up how the 170 centuries were distributed among the
five classes. There are two points however which I would not
pass over. In the first place the Romans knew only of five classes:
so that Dionysius, who calls such as gave in less than 12,500 ases
a sixth class, is just as much mistaken in this as when he allows
them only one century. Next, here again the regularity of the
· scale assuredly puts it beyond a question that his statement of the
fortune of the fifth class at 12,500 ases or 1250 drachms, and not
Livy's at 11,000 ases, is the correct one. 'Vhether the last was oc­
casioned by Livy's finding it somewhere mentioned perhaps, that
the difference between the limit of the fifth class and the proleta­
rians amounted to 11,000 ases,_:or whether the account which gave
the first class 110,000 ases, estimated the fifth at a tenth of this,
as the sum in Dionysius would be a tenth of the 125,000 ases
which' others assign to the first class,-cannot be decicled; though.
the first is the more probable solution: but it is not a waste of time
to consider how such an error may have arisen. ,
The classes, and they alone, were divided into centuries of the
juniors and the seniors, equal in number; the former destined for
service in the field, the latter for the defence of the city: the age of
the seniors began with the completion of the forty-fifth year 1018,
The theology of the Romans taught 19 that twelve times ten solar
years were the term fixed by Nature for the life of man, and that
beyond this the gods themselves had no power to prolong it; that
Fate had narrowed its span to thrice thirty; that Fortune abridges
were allowed to draw lots for the dignity of the. archon eponymus. And
even the landed property was only rated at the value of the crops.
1018 Varro in Censorinus 14. Dionysius iv. 16. AllM>r-'l'ou' ri71'ep 'l'n·
'l'<tpiiJtoM'tt. 'x<tl ?l'fv'Tf h~ )'l)'O>O'l'<t' i71'0 'T(l)V i;tonr.or IT<rp<t'T!r}ITl(.<01 'l"MV n1>.1xf<1.V.
19 Servius on lEn. 1v. 653.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 339

even this period by a variety of chances: against these the protection

of thegods was implored. Of the length assigned to man's life by
Fate, just half is marked off by the above mentioned limit: and
since boyhood according to Varro ceased with the fifteenth year,
after the close of which the prmtexta was exchanged for the manly
toga at the next Liberalia1020 , we here again find the number thirty, a
third part of man's whole lifetime,_ as the number of the years con­
tained in the vigorous prime of life. Here again the numbers them­
selves are a sure thread to guide us; and with reference to the
original institution of Servius, what Gellius states on the authority
of Tubero, that persons were not reckoned to be seniors until the
completion of their forty-sixth year"', is _certainly erroneous. The
term of military service may always have been denoted by the ex­
pression, minoi· ·annis sex et quadraginta22 : this however meant
the person who had not yet entered into his forty-sixth year 2•. I
have not overlooked. that this. year is included by Polybius in the
military age 24 : but the extension wall brought about by the want of
a more plentiful choice of men hardened by service;· and for this
purpose advantage was taken of an expression, the meaning of
which naturally became indistinqt, when the general connexion run­
ning through the ancient institutions had been lost sight of. In the
same manner Tubero, a contemporary of Cicero, a man of busi­
ness, and no antiquarian, accounts the sixteenth year a part of boy­
hood25; in oppositon to Varro and to the evidence afforded by the
symmetry of the numbers: and unquestionably Nature did not
allow herself to be dictated to by such forms; nor did the lad of
'of fifteen put on strength for a campaign together with the manly

1020 Noris Cenotaph. Pi.s. r. p. 116. ff. Diss. 11. 4. So al.most the whole
of the sixteenth year might elapse previously.
21 x. 28. Ad annum quadragesimum sextum juniores, supra eum an­
num seniores appellasse. '
22 Livy XLIII. 14.
23 ·Such as were mirwrcs annis viginti quinque were prohibited, with a
few exceptions, from holding offices of trust or dignity: but annus vigesimus
quintus coeptus pro pleno habetur: Ulpian I. 8. D. de muneribus (L. 4). In an
affair connected with constitutional law the expression was interpreted after
the ancient legal practice. .•
24 The Romans are liable to the conscription iv Toi, TaTT<1.pa'.&onet. &«1
·~ ~TfO'IY ..,,.. i'"'"'· VI. l!J.
25 Gellius x. 28. Pueros esse existimasse, qui minorcs essent annis
scptemdecim: that is, according to the explanation in the text, who had not
yet entered upon their seventeenth year. The next clause-inde ab anno
scptimodccimo militcs scripsisse-settlcs the question in favour of the disputed
reading, juniores ab annis l:leptemdecim scribunt, in Livy xxu. 57.. ,
340 llISTORY OF ROME.

toga. According1y during the first year he was kept merely to

bodily exerci8es, and instructed how to demean himself among
men: and so long as this schooling lasted, it can hardly have been
the custom for him to vote in his century: thus, even if he had the
right, the matter was put off; and if the time to be spent among,the
juniors was still reckoned at thirty years, men would only be­
come seniors with the forty-seventh. Accor<ling to what Gellius
farther quotes out of Tubero, all who were above forty-six would
have been numbered among ·the seniors: according to a different
well-known statement, only such as had not yet closed their sixtieth
year; with which all civic rights expired. , This opinion rests upon
respectable authorities; and the obligation of the seniores to defend
the city, as we read in Livy, speaks strongly for their having
been separate from the senes. The same is also confirmed by the
principles of Greek law; for though Aristotle considers the old men
who have obtained their dismissal, as well as the boys who are not
yet enrolled, in the light of citizens, it is only as imperfect ones 102e,
Every body sees that one of the fundamental principles in this
ronstitution was to adapt the distribution of power, and of arms as
the means of maintaining power, to the scale of property 21; a
scheme akin to the theory which regar<ls a state as a joint-stock
c,ompany. Now in this relation between the juniors and the seniors
yet another purpose displays itself. The ancient nations often en•
trusted the charge of taking counsel for the common weal to the
elders exclusively; and in a like spirit the seniors are placed on a par
with the juniors as to the number of their centuries: nor can we
fail to perceive here the justness of Cicero's words, that. throughout
the whole of the system the aim was to withdraw the power of
deciding from the majority*: for in this way the minority were to
preponderate even within the same class. That is to say, the
seniors. v;hether we take them in the wider or the narrower extent,
were much fewer than the juniors. Returns of population, arranged
according to the different periods of human life, are rare ; nor do
I know of any Italian one; and certainly the relative numbers must

10~6 Politics lIJ. 1. Kctl '71"11.'ilct, <rou' f'~'ll""' Ji iiA111.lctr t')'')'t)'f"f'Plrovr

x.ctl 'I'.•"'
)'tponct, <r•u' d<;>ttµhou' <;>ct<re•r,eir«I µiv.,..,, 9TOAi'Tct'• oux, ,:11'1'.ll>' 11.
Though great generals were sometimes called to the command of armies at a
very advanced age, there is the less force in this argument with regard to
Rome, because the knights were not divided according to their time of life.
~7 The equestrian order, as has just been remarked, stands apart from
this system. ·
" De Re p. 11. 22. Curavit-ne plurimum valcant plurfoii. ,
 IIISTOR Y OF ROME. 341

inevitably vary in different climates: but assuredly we shall no where

be far from the mark, if we assume that the number of men living
who have completed their forty-fifth year and are under sixty-one,
amounts to less than a third, that of all who have passed their
forty-fifth year, only to about half, of those. living between seven­
teen and forty-six; in the tweQty-eight years which we must take
as the actual period of military service in the field, and of the cor­
responding franchise 1028 • Here again we find a numerical propor­
tion which makes it likely that in the scheme of the centurial con­
stitution the ratio of one to two was in reality taken as a basis,
whatever limit we may draw for the age of the seniors.
The difference among the nunibers contained in the centuries of
different classes must have been exceedingly great: the principle
of their original arrangement has already been pointed out 2 u; name­
ly, the proportion between the aggregate taxable property of each
class and that of the whole body •. Three persons of the first class,
four of the second, six of the third, twelve of the fourth, four and
twenty of· the fifth, stood on a level, taking an average, in poipt of
fortune; and consequently likewise in their votes : therefore the
numbers in the centuries of the lower classes must have increased
at the same rate. The second, third, and fourth classes must each
have possessed property amounting to a fourth of the aggregate for­
tune of the first: the fifth, to three-eighths ; for else it would not
have had thirty centuries. Accordingly the number of citizens in
the second class came to a third, that in the third to half, of those
in the first; that in the fourth was equal to it; that in the fifth
thrice as great. By the principle of this division, out of thirty-five
citizens six: belonged to the first class, twenty-nine to the other
four. Moreover if the juniors of the first class had not actually
been about 4000, there was no reason to make forty centuries of
them: the inconvenience of so large. a number for voting cannot
have escaped the legislator. If the seniors of the same class were
taken to be half the juniors, the numbers just set down came out in
thousands, giving 6000 for the first class, 35,000 .for the whole
five 80 , This sum in no way disagrees with the one recorded as the

1028 I have deduced this result from the English population-returns of the
year 1821. The· relative numbers for the males, accurately expressed, are,
from 17 to 45, 0.6637; from 45 to 60, 0.2035; above 60, 0.1328; or the total
above 45, 0.3363. Calculating from the close of the fifteenth year, the pro­
portion would be that of 0.6863 to 0.3137.
29 Above p. 337.

30 This ancient numerical proportion rnay 'VerY. probably contain the

 342 HISTORY OF RO.ME.

result of the first census, 84,700 1031 ; a number which however has no
better claim to pass for historical, tpan the statements in the Fasti
of the days on which king Servius triumphed. From all appear­
ance some calculation adapted to the above mentioned proportion
lies at the bottom of this number; it certainly was not hit upon at
random: but there is little chance of our being able so to combine
what we know, as to divine the number assumed for the knights
and for the centuries not included in the classes. From the very .
first the numbers in the classes can have afforded nothing more
than an approximation to the object aimed at,.of representing the
taxable property: in process of time, and as the nominal value of
things altered, they must have departed so far from any such rela­
tion, that, as is the fate of all similar forms, this too became utterly
unfit for use and unmeaning. ·
A second. division of the centuries was into, the assiduers or locu­
pletes and the proletarians. The former must have included the
craftsmen attached to the first and fifth class. The name of· assi­
duers however was given to all whose fortune came to 1500 ases 8 ~
and upward: so that they also comprised. all between this limit and
the fifth class : and since on pressing emergencies the proletarians
were called out and equipped with arms at the public expense, it
plainly follows that these assiduers, though comprehended in no
class, can still less have been exempted from military service; nor
can they have been without the right of voting, in which the pro­
letarians and the capitecensi partook. They must doubtless have
been the accensi, who, Livy says, voted like the musicians with
the fifth class: or, more correctly speaking, as we now know from
Cicero, they formed two centuries, the accensi and velati; which
were probably distinguished from each other by their census as well
as in other respects; so that those were perhaps called accensi, who
were rated at more than say 7000 ases; those velati, ·whose return
fell between that sum and the proletarians. It has already been
noticed as a peculiarity in old Latin, especially in te~hnical and
official phrases, that the names of two objects, which, whether from
reason why, when a century, as Cicero says (pro Plancio 20(49)), was only
a part of a tribe, the number 'of tribes was raised to just five and thirty, and
no higher.
31 Dionysius rv. 22. The odd thousands are wanting in Livy, where
we find the round number 80000; doubtless only through the carelessness of
the person to whom we owe our revision of the text. For Eutropius, who
takes every thing from Livy, speaks of 83000 (1. ,7). The statement of the
census found in some manuscripts of the epitome of Livy is an interpolation.
32 , Cicero de Re p. n. 22. · Gellius xvi. 10.
 HISTORY OF ROl\IE. 343
their contrast ·or affinity, were habitually referred to each other,
were combined by mere juxtaposition, without any conjunction; as
empti venditi, locati conducti, socii Latini, Prisci Latini*: thus it
was the practice to say and to write accensi velati; a practice fa­
voured by their being united, as is certain, in the one battalion of
the accensi. When the body of reserve no longer followed the
standards, as it had done under the old system; when the obligation
to military service and the mode of raising levies had been entirely
remodelled after a new plan; and yet centuries of accensi and velati,
though doubtless composed of persons of a very different sort, were
still subsisting-being preserved, it may be supposed, because by
the ritual the beadles who attended upon the magistrates even when
offering sacrifices were taken from amongst them 1033- ; the usage of
ancient times was then so totally forgotten, that writers spoke of
an accensus velatus, just as of a socius Latinus, which would have
offended Cato's ears as a gross solecism. Their military duty was
the lightest in the whole army; since they followed the legion
without any b_usiness or burthen; nor were they marched in troops
against the enemy; but one by one they filled up the gaps that
were made, and received arms for that purpose 34·: besides they acted
as orderlies to the officers down to ~he decurion 81 • A great many
of them must have returned home from the short Roman campaigns
without having ever come to blows,' and frequently not without
booty.
While these held the lowest rank among the assideurs, the car­
penters on the other hand had a place allotted them by the side of
the first class. Cicero only gives them one century: and if we

* Above pp. 224. 288.

1033 EvE:n Cato in ills time only knew thein as ministratores. Varro de
L. L. vr. 3. p. 92.
34 This is the account given by Varro, in the same place, of the adscrip­
tivi: and the passage quoted from him in Noni us de Doct. lndag. (xn) n. 8. v.
accensi, shows that in the section de adscriptivis he treated of the accensi.
Their identity as a body of reserve is also recognized by Festus in the Epit.
v. adscriptitii : so is that of the velati both there and again v. 'lJelati. Whether
they were really also the same with thefercntarii, as has been asserted, that
is, whether both together were embraced under that name, and whether their
business was to supply the soldiers in battle with arms and drink, are ques­
tions 1 leave undetermined. He that rejects my hypothesis has to show in
what way then those assiduers, who stood below the fifth class, served and
voted; and from what other body the accensi, who in the earlier form of th~
lt>gion made up thirty maniples, can have been taken. Livy too mentions
them along with the fifth class:
35 Varro in the same passage of Nonius.'
344 IIISTORY OF ROME.

were reduced to the necessity of adopting the testimony of the most

trustworthy witness, I at least should not hesitate an instant between
him and the two historians. l4>wever here again a sure trace is
afforded us by the relation among the numbers. I shall speak
lower down of the comitia held in the camp*; where consequently
none· but the junior centuries and the five attached to them, the
Jabri, accensi, velati, liticines, and cornicines, were present: in
these no distinction was made between the juniors and the seniors,
any more than among the knights. Now the junior centuries
amounted to eighty-five; so that along with these five they made
up three times thirty, that number which runs through the earliest
institutions. This observation, I conceive, decides the matter; and
at the same time we may here catch a further glimpse of the reason
why, even if the. returns of the census had deviated considerably
from the abovementioned scheme, the number of centuries in the
classes would still have been fixed at just 170.
The proletarians in the most precise sense of the name, accord­
ing to Gellius 1088 , were those who gave in their property under 1500
ases, and above 375 : such as came below this mark, and those who
had noihing at all, were called capitecensi: in a wider sense, and
as contrasted with the assiduers, both these divisions were' com­
yrised under the name of prolefarians. That they formed two
centuries, the proletarians and the capitecensi, we should fincl
expressly stated in Cicero, but that the leaf of the manuscript
with the remainder of his account of the ce~turies, which breaks
off with the word proletariis, has been lost3 7, It began beyond all
doubt with the words capite censis 8 ". Cicero reckoned 96 centu­
ries for the last four classes and the six odd centuries attached to
them: which number is made up, if, after the accensi, velati, liti­
cines, cornicines, we place two more; to wit, the proletarii and the
capitecensi 39 • Thus there would be 195 in the whole; a number

See the text to· note IO!l4.

1036 XVI. 10.
37 The sixth leaf of the eighteenth quaternion.
38 Let nobody guess that it was the century ni quis scivit; whi?h was
improperly termed a century, and was only called into existence when some
one stated that he had neglected to vote in his own.
39 Cicero has unfolded the whole system of this constitution with admi­
rable skill, at the very time that he declines giving a dry list of the classes.
Ignorant scribes indeed, and that unfortunate set of book-correctors who
waited in the train of the booksellers of antiquity, and who, as they even
boast in the declarations at the end of their manuscripts, improved them for
sale sine libris pro virihus in.genii, found him unintelligible; and thus through
 lllSTORY OF ROME. 345
which is confirmed by another relation. For the 98 centuries
formed by' the knights and the first class being set in opposition to
all the rest so as to outvote them, it is natural that they should
amount to just half the sum total and one more: and such is the
case, if the lesser half consisted of the four lower classes, the six
centuries just mentioned, and the carpenters; in all 97. The car-

careless transcription and stupid and rash alterations did that hideous cor­
ruption arise by which the passage is disfigured. I have the same clear and
conscientious conviction that the restoration I have set forth in another place
is correct, as I have of the truth of my historical propositions. (The emend­
ations suggested by the author in Mai's edition were afterward reconsidered
Ly him in a tract Uebpr die Nacltricltt von den Comitien der Centurien im zwey­
ten Buck Ciceros de re publica, and in a controversial Duplik gegen Iierrn
Steinacker.) Perhaps others will feel no less certain, if they can but clearly
see the manner in which the corruption was produced. That a person not
familiar with manuscripts, and especially with very old ones, however free
he may be from prejudice, or however capable of pronouncing an opinion on
critical questions, will still find it difficult to enter into the following descrip­
tion, may easily be supposed: but this deficiency does not give him any
higher title to pass judgment. The clue in the labyrinth, as must be evident
on a candid consideration of the passage in its disorder, is this: Cicero di­
vided all the centuries into two masses: one contained the first class and the
carpenters attached to it; the other all the rest, the knights and the !J6 centu­
ries. And then he says: if &om among the latter the knights alone joined
the former, the 96 centuries, even if they kept inseparably together, were
outvoted.
The text .in its sound state ran thus': Nunc rationem vidctis esse talem ut
prima dassis, addita centuria qwe ad .mmmum usum urbis fabris tignariis est
data, LXXXI centurias kabeat: quibus ex cuv centuriis, tot enim reliqua: sunt,
equitum cent1triai cum sez suffragiis solflJ si accesserunt etc. In a passage 0£
this kind a reader will commonly go over the calculation; and thus some one
having written on the side decem ct octo, the number of the centuries in the
eque!ltrian order, the words crept into the text of a manuscript; so that the
clause now ran : equitum centurial cum sex suffragiis decem et octo solce si
accesserunt.
Now a line of this was left out-the words eq. c. e. s: Bil.ff. x. et-then sup­
plied in the margin, and in the transcript foisted into the wrong place, after
talem ut; so that now the passage was sheer nonsense, and read as follows:
.N'unr. rationem videtis esse talem ut eqvii:um centuria! cum sex S11jfrtigiis x et
prima classis ad c. q. a. s. u. u. f. t. e. d. LUXI. c. !. q. 11. cxiv. '· tot eni11& re•
liquai sunt octo solce si accesserunt etc.
Next came an ignorant emender, and fancied to put sense into it out of his
own head. The word octo had remained in its place: soon afterward the 96
centuries are spoken of: now as 96 and 8 make 104, cuv was altered into
c1v. In the same way x was struck out further back after sujfragiis, because
it did not give even a shadow of meaning. As to the Lxxxvw1, it arose from
a reader adding up the same vm with the LXXXI.
I.-TT
346 HISTORY OF ROME.
penters, though stationed alongside of the first class, were yet by
their nature estranged from the aristocracy of birth and wealth1040 •
The proletarians and capitecensi were not only inferior to the
locupletes from the insignificance of their share in the right of vot­
ing, but to all the assiduers in their civil capacity and estimation.
It is an obscure question how one citizen was a vindex for an­
other: none however but an assiduer could be so for his fellow"' :
and the phrase locuples testis demonstrates that even in giving evi­
dence there was a distinction humiliating to the poor 41 • Where
such was the case, it is impossible to suppose that the proletarians
were eligible to plebeian offices. But to make amends for this they
were exempted from taxes 42 •
\Vhether the five classes were on a perfect level as to their eli­
gibility to offices, is a point on which nothing, is known. What is
said concerning their being represented by the tribunes when the
number of these was raised to five*, seems certain; and therefore
probably each severally elected its deputy, and out of its own body.
The sums at which the plebeians and rerarians stand rated in
the census, were not the amount of their fortune after our notions,
,which account every source of income capable of transfer by inhe­
ritance or alienation a part of the capital ; but only that of such
property as they held in absolute ownership ; perhaps to the ex­
clusion of many kinds even of this. I have said, the plebeians and
rerarians: because it can hardly be supposed that the patricians ori·
ginally gave in any return of their fortune and paid a tax upon it;
the census furnished no measure for the.ir wealth. For the estates
in the pul:Jlic domains which they possessed and enjoyed the usu­
fruct or made grants of, transmitting by inheritance the same pos­
session and right of making such grants, under. a reservation of the

1040 Consequently Cicero might certainly have expressed himself much

more simply than he does in the passage explained in the last note; if in
treating of this obsolete matter Jie had recollected that the carpenters in rank
belonged to the upper half, in character to the lower. This is a further proof.
that there can have been only one century of them: and so of the other six
each belonged to a particular class of people.
* Gellius xvr. 10 from the twelve tables : Assiduo vindex assiduus
esto : proletario quoi quis volet vindex esto:
41 That locuples and assidu:us were equivalent, we learn from CiceJ:o de
Re p. 11. 22. Gellius too says : Assiduus in duodecim tabulis pro locuplete
et facile facienti dictus.
. 42 The etymology for the name of the opposite class, the assidui, ab asse
danda, from their being liable to be taxed, is evidently right.
* See note 1360.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 347
sovereign's title to resume the lands and to dispose of them other­
wise, cannot have been returned by them as property. They were
only a possession for a time: such refinements as those by which
modern nations extract a partial value, to be considered as absolute
property1043, from a life-interest, were. unheard of among the an­
cients. As to the persons liable to taxation, it is clear that all those
things, which, as objects of Quiritary property, were in the strictest
sense called res mancipii44,-such as brass coin, houses, parcels of
land, the rights attached to them, buildings and implements on them,
slaves, beasts of burthen and draught, and horses-were compre­
hended in the census. · But this statement of the jurists was pro­
bably much too confined for the early ages, even as a list of such
tl1ings as belonged to that particular kind of property' : flocks of
smaller cattle appertained to husbandry, just as much as beasts of
. draught and butthen; nor would the transfer of property in them
be attended with fewer formalities ; although it was not worth the
trouble to -employ the balance and to call witnesses for the sale of
a single goat or sheep. Gaius "pronounces silver and gold to be
res nee mancipii : yet Fabricius and Rufinus gave in a return of
their wrought silver to the censor* : and so,- even if res maneipii
and censui eensendo were equivalent from the beginning, we cannot
draw any certain conclusion from the lists in him and in Ulpian as
to the extent of the objects which made up the census of a Roman
c1t1zen. It is at least possible that at one time every thing which
did not come under the head of mere possession, granted ·whether
by the state or by a patron, was res mancipii and was called so ;
that the title to a ship might be maintained in court by the same
proc_ess as . that to a house ; and that all this was reckoned into a
person's capital. But a decisive discovery on this point is just as
little to be hoped foi: as on the mode of assessing the capital. An
actual valuation would have been impracticable : mention is made
of a formulary used by the censors 45 : hereby. we must doubtless
understand a table of rates for every kind and sort of taxable ob­

1043 For the sake of representing a freehold.

44 If scholars, remembering how the genitive Tulli and like are written,
would be content to regard mancipi as the genitive of mancipium, property,
and .would make this apparent by their way of spelling it, we should be rid of
an unprofitable puzzle.·
* F'lorus 1. 18. 2'2: and the passages quoted by Camera in the note.
45 Livy XXIX.15. Placere ccnsum in cploni~s agi ex fonnula ab Roman is
ccnsoribus data.
348 , HISTORY OF ROME.
jects, which rates might be applied to particular cases by multipli­
cation. • . .
Not only however were many elements of wealth omitted in the
census : what made it still more inadequate as a criterion of pro­
perty, was, th.at debts, as the sequel of this history will show, were
not deducted*. It would be a most fruitless effort, to pore over the
ll!Jmbers in the scheme of the centuries with the hope of discover·
ing what may throw light on the wealth of Rome.
A peculiar stumbling block in every attempt to make out the na·
ture of the census lies in the numbers employed as measures of
property; which sound so enormous. In an explanation of the in·
stitutions which are handed down as the acts of Servius Tullius,
this difficulty must some where or other be elucid11-ted; more espe·
cially, since the coining the first Roman money is also attributed
to him: wherever such a discussion were inserted, it would be an
episode; and my reason for introducing it here, before the inquiry
into the nature of the tribute which corresponded to the census, is,
that I believe there is no other pla<:e where it would not still more
interrupt the connexion. ·
Dionysius gives the census of the classes in drachms, whereby
he means denaries : for these were originally minted ·of the same
weight and value with the Greek silver coin; and even after they
had been clipped and debased, it continued usual, at least in the
language of books, to call them by the Greek name, His numbers
in drachms are exactly the tenth of Livy's, whose estimate is in
asest 048 : and this was the proportion between them, before the as
was lowered to an ounce in weight. But the ases weighing the
sixth of a pound, with which the statement of Dionysius agrees,
were themselves on a reduced scale: and it is impossible to discarcl
the question what was the value in silver of the sums enumerated
in the census at the time the centuries were instituted; when, as is
universally assumed, the as weighed a full pound. The first thought
that suggests itself is, that it must then have been worth in silver
·r61!'ths of a drachm, or nearly 4 obols.
It was a remarkable and very singular peculiarity of the nations
. in the middle of Italy, to employ copper in heavy masses for their
currency, not silver: whereas the southern provinces, and the coast
as far as Campania, though the mode of computing by ounces'was

* See the text to note 1287.

1046 With regard to the fifth class they followed accounts that did not
·agree : see p. 338.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 349
not unknown even in Sicily, made use of silver money. That tl1e
Etruscans, Umbrians, and some of the Sabellian tribes coined cop­
per, is proved by the inscriptions on specimens that remain: as to
the Latins and Samnites, no such pieces of their m<>ney with in·
scriptions have been found, any more than silver coins of theirs
belonging to an early age 1047, But the great variety in the form of
the ases without inscriptions shows that they must have been minted
in a number of towns: the large sums of brass-money the Roman
armies obtained amid their booty in Samnium, while but an incon­
siderable quantity of silver was carried home in the triumph, evince
that the former was the currency there : so was it undoubtedly in
Latium: and a part of those nameless coins probably belonged to
these two nations. Rome had the same currency; and according
to a tradition, which very clearly proves how far and wide Servius
Tullius was celebrated. as the author of all institutions on civil
matters of importance, he was named by Timreus as the person
who first stamped money at Rome; the people before his time
having.employed brass in the lump, tell rude 48•
We will let this account take its place by the side of other stories
about our hero~ a further statem~nt connected with it, that the
imprc!is on the first ases was an ox, must be rejected as positively
wrong. For a piece with that impress has been preserved 49, as to
the genuineness of which there can be no doubt: an impostor would
have given it the full weight of a pound; but it weighs only eight
ounces: and although no Roman as hitherto discovered is quite
equal to a full pound in weight, there are many far heavier thau
that one; nor indeed have we any ground to question there having
been ases of full weight, though they have now disappeared. The
pieces that Timreus had heard of were not coined till after the
standard lrad already 'undergone several reductions. There would
be nothing unwarrantable in supposing that this unusual image con­
tained an allusion to the law of the consuls C. Julius and P. Papi­
rius, who, certain fines having been imposed in head of cattle, fixed
the value of each several head in money 50•
If instead of money, properly so called, which is only a measure
of value, some commodity or other,· which as such is an object.of

1047 The denaries of the Latin colonies are all of them more recent than
the oldest Roman ones.
48 Pliny, H. N. xxx1r1. 13.
49 Eckhel Doctr. num. vet. v. p. 14. The oblong pieces with an ox on
them (p. 11) belong likewise to this class. ·
50 Cicero de Re p. JJ, 35, compared with Gellius u. 1.
350 HISTORY OF ROME.
dP-mand, be employed, one of the disadvantages necessarily con·
nected with it is the inconvenient size of the particular pieces : thus
it is with the pieces of cloth or of rocksalt in Abyssinia, with the
cocoa in :Mexico; and thus it was with the brass in ancient Italy.
The brass, I say: for it is only to avoid singularity of expression,
when it can be avoided, that I follow others in giving the name of
copper money to what in reality was· bronze; copper, made more
fusible by an admixture of tin~ 051 or· zinc. How very general the
use of this metal was, is proved by the armour of the Servian legion:
and there can be no question that all the better household utensils
were of the same material. Thus brass was a thing of daily need;
and the masses of it were so easily transformed by fusion, that no
loss was incurred by that process ; at the same time the impress
upon it saved the trouble·of weighing. Nothing but a very illtimed
recollection of our own customs with regard to money has given rise
to the notion that the quadrangular or oval pieces were not money
just as much as the round: and. in this manner it may be perfectly
well explained how pieces were coined of still greater weight than
an as, up to a decussis. Even in late times, perhaps in those of
Timreus, the Ligurians, poor as they were, had shields of brass 59•
This general use implies its abundance and cheapness: to be em­
ployed for the armour of all the hoplites brass must havl'.l been pro­
curable at a lower rate than ·iron : and indeed foreign traders in
the Homeric age bring iron to Italy, to obtain a cargo of copper53 •
The produce of copper mines is very variable; and those of Tuscany,
especially in the country about Volterra, not to mention that in that
depopulated region they may be neglected without sufficient reason,
may now be exhausted, and notwithstanding may once have been
immensely productive: to this was added the produce of the mines
in Cypnis, ascertained to have been enormous; the influx of which
into Italy is attested by the Latin and our own name for the metal.
The dependence of that island upon the Phenicians in very remote
times opened a way for this to the Punic marts ; and Carthaginian
1051 , As Klaproth has proved by analysing some.
52 Strabo tv. p. ·202. d ..
53 See above p. 49, note 195. Mr Arnold, the scholar who introduced
the first edition of this history to the English public by a friendly review, has
called my attention to an opinion of Werner's-which a German indeed ought
not to have had suggested to him by a foreigner-that copper, which·of all
metals is the oftenest found pure in the ore, for this reason probably was also
the first that was wrought. Ile further remarks in support of the view in
which it givt>s me pleasure to find him ·concurring, that the Massagetes ac­
cording to Herodotus (1. 215) had only brass, no iron. ·
 HISTORY OF ROME. . 351
vessels must have brought it into.Italy. The low price consequent
on such plenty agrees with every thing that is known concerning
the quantity of brass money and its value in the times before the
introduction of silver money. Ten thousand pounds of it for the
purchase, two thousand annually for the keep of a knight's horse,
are sums which, according to the weight and the market price, would
in later times have been so extravagant as to be utterly inconceivable.
The heavy copper money was piled up in .rooms 1054 ; and it is re­
corded that during the Veientine war some persons sent the tribute
they owed to the state in wagon loads to the treasury 55, · The
younger Papirius in his triumph after .the Samnite war brought
above two million pounds weight of copper money*; Duilius still
more 58 : in both cases the money of this kind far surpassed in value
the silver taken in the same war. 'Whether at the time when the
census was introduced the as was still full weight, or had already
become lighter, is beyond our knowledge: thus much however is
evident from a comparison of prices, that Dionysius, so far as any
thing like a proportion can be made out, was justified in assuming
that the old as was of the same· value relatively to silver with the as
reduced to the weight of the old sextant: in other words the
weight of the brass coin was diminished, because the metal had
become so much dearer in comparison with silver.
It is a gross mistake in Pliny,-and one quite unpardonable, since
he must a thousand times have seen pieces of money which palpably
confuted his error,-to regard the first reduction of the as which
he seems to have found recorded in the Annals, as the first actually
made. Even at the present day every collection of pieces of heavy
copper money contains the most striking evidence that the weight
was only lowered to two· ounces by degrees 57, · The rise in the
price of copper is attributable to the same causes which enhance its
value when the currency is in a nobler metal; to the decrease in the
produce of the mines, and the increase in its consumption an<l ex­
portation. The weight may have begun to be. diminished very
1054 Varrq de L. L. 1v. 36. p. 50. Non in area ponebant, sed in aliqua
cella stipabant.
55 Livy 1v. GO. * Livy x. 46.
56 2,100,000: as appears from the inscription on the column.
57 It would throw light on the history of the arts, if the impresses on
the ases and the lesser coins were examined, in connexion with the gradual
diminution in their weight; for they exhibit the execution of the artists in a
regular series through more than two centuries. The most recent may have
followed ancient models: in the oldest we see what the art was already able
to effect.
352 HISTORY OF ROME.

early: if however the coin which Timreus held to be the oldest,

referred, as I have suggested, to the establishment of a determinate
sum for mulcts, at the time of that measure it was still four times
as heavy as after it had been lowered in the first Punic war. Now
as the consuls Julius and Papirius valued a sheep at ten ases, so at
Athens, where the currency was silver, it was rated by the laws of
Solon at a drachm 1058 : an ox, which the Roman law estimated at a
hundred ases, at Athens was only worth five drachms. It is pro·
bable that between the time of Solon and the Peloponnesian war
there had been a general rise of prices through Greece and Italy;
and an ox at Rome too about the year 160 may probably have sol<l.
for no more than fifty ases: what I am aiming at is only to show
that of the heavy ases, no le.ss than of the lighter, ten may on the
average be taken for equivalent to a drachm. On this point the prices
of corn are decisive: if the diminution in the weight of the as .had
lessened its value as money; there must needs have been a nominal
increase in the price of ~om.
This was regarded as singularly low about the year 814, when
corn fell to an as a modius: but an equally low price was recorded
by the chronicl.es in the year 504, when the as no longer weighed
more than two ounces 59 ; and a hundred years later, when copper
coins, having been reduced to a twelfth of their original weight,
were merely used for a sm"all currency, and all prices were ·rated. in
silver, wheat often sold in Cisalpine Gaul for no more than two
light asesoo. On the other hand after the dictatorship of Scylla the
modius in Sicily was at two or som~times three sesterces, that is,
from 8 to 12 depreciated ases~ two to the ounce 81 : and these were
customary prices in an age when the money-value of every thing
had risen to several times its ancient amount; while the former was
so extremely low as to be noticed in the chronicles. Now had not
the price of brass been continually rising, so that the weight of it
which corresponded in value to a fixed quantity of the universal
currency, silver, was constantly diminishing, the price, which three
centuries and a half before was unusuahy small, must have been
1058 Gellius xx. 1. Demetrius Phalereus in Plutarch Solon. c. 23.
5!) Pliny xvm. 4. As this was in the first Punic war, Italy must at that
time have been accustomed to j!Xport corn, and was then suffering from a glut
owing to the stoppage. ·
60 Polybius u.15. Ile says, the Sicilian medimnus often sold for4 obols,
or two thirds of a drachm : the denary already consisted ofl6 ases. Borghesi
has completely proved that the last diminution of the as did not take place till
the time of Sylla.
61 Cicero against Verres 2. 111. 75.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 353

twice or thrice as high as the above mentioned common market

prices.
The deteriorating the coinage in the manner usual among barba­
rous nations and in ages of ignorance is mostly to serve very gross,
nay profligate ends: nevertheless there may also be a state of things
in which it is wise, and even necessary, to adopt a lower.standard.
Through a nation's .own fault its own smaller currency, or through
circumstances that could not be forestalled lighter money from abroad,
may have become predominant and have driven the heavier out of
circulation: attempting to restore it were to swim against the stream,
and can only breed mischief and disgrace. If a s~te has fallen
into the unfortunate system of paper money, and this sinks in com­
parison with silver, then, should a juncture of favourable circumstances
furnish the means of re-establishing a metallic currency, it is alto­
gether· absurd, nay purely disastrous, to make the metal resume its
place with its standard unchanged, and the sums in all contracts
abide by their nominal amount, while it is impossible to keep up
prices at the height where they stood at the time of the paper cir­
culation106s•. Nay if, even without paper money, all prices have for
a course of years been forced up by extraordinary circumstances far
above the mean of those which prevailed during the preceding gene­
rations ; if the expenses and bur thens of the country have increased
at the same rate; and then at length this feverish condition subsides,
and every thing drops down for a continuance to the lowest average
prices ; in such a case the only hope of safety lies in a proportionate
reduction of the standard: and to. this result common sen.se led men
in former times, whereas theory and delusion uow cry out against
itss. At Rome the exigency was still more pressing. As in the
middle ages, from the constant and unreplaced efilux of money
toward the East, silver became scarcer and scarcer on the north of
the Alps, and all prices kept on progressively falling; so at Rome,

1002 . In this way the state has to pay a fictitious debt: whereas of itself
every funded system, if prolonged without a reduction, first breeds a herd of
lazy and ignorant fundholders, and of beggars, and after all ends in a. bank­
ruptcy, only too late.
63 In the years from 1740 to 1750 corn in England sold for about three­
fifths of the price it had stood at GO years earlier : in France the prices at the
two epochs were nominally equal ; because the standard had been altered in
the proportion of 13 to 20. Supposing• now that the landed property in the
two countries had been generally burthened with mortgages, thousands, who
in the former must have been ruined, would have been saved in the latter;
and that not only among the proprietors who would have retained their inher­
itance; but even among the mortgagees.
1.-uu
354 HISTORY OF ROME.
as we have seen, copper gradually grew dearer in comparison with
silver, and consequently with all other commodities: and this,
although Rome had no national debt, and her citizens no hereditary
mortgages, must still have produced extreme hardship and distress
in abundance of instances. The pay to the horsemen and foot­
soldiers ·stood fixed at a stated number of ases: and though the
countrymen now received fewer ases for his crop, he. had neverthe~
Jess to pay the same sum as if money were not worth more than
before. This of itself would settle the question: without· doubt
however the times when reductions were resolved upon, were chiefly
those when the state was desirous of relieving the debtors: and
history presents so many such occasions, that there is surely ground
for believing we may discover with tolerable accuracy when those
progressive diminutions in the weight of the as, which the collec­
tions exhibit, took place.
After Rome had acquired the dominion over Campania and the
south of Italy, where silver was in generd circulation, more com­
plex causes were at work. The tithes and farmed duties would
come in from thence in silver: the silver coined in the South with
the superscription of Rome undoubtedly circulated within the city
itself: at length denaries were issued as the national money. Now
if in doing this.a false proportion was assumed; if a decussis of
thirty ounces in weight,-on which scale, as the number of pieces
we find infer, the coinage must have stood .still for some time,
although for a much shorter than on that of four ounces to the as1os4
-was worth more than a denary; things must have gone on as
they do now, when it is attempted to keep gold and silver in fixed
and false proportions beside each other in circulation : the metal
which is rated too low quits the country 65 • A direct proof that
such was the case with the Italian copper money, is supplied by
the immensely large sum .which Duilius brought out of. Sicily,
althou,gh the currency there was that of the Greeks, silver and gold:
so that the copper must have been introduced by traffic; in exchange
for silver. Now if brass grew dearer in consequence of the Punic war,
because the importation of Cyprian copper and of tin was ~topped,

1064 · Here surely I may say with confidence, ever since the secession to
the Janiculan; that is, during about thirty years. ,
65 That trafficking in money and speculations in different sorts of it
were by no means unknown to the ancients, is proved by a remarkable pass­
age in Xenophon de Vectigalibus 3. 2. The attic drachms were of fine silver;
and Xenophon was very well aware that a state promotes its own advantage
by coining good money.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 355

the republic had no more choice whether she would lower her ases
to the weight.of a sextant or not, than France had forty years ago
about altering her gold coinage. . If such a measure was not taken,
all the money of that metal would go out of the country; and the
state lose as much as its nominal value was too low. The rise of
copper still continued; and two ounces were still too heavy: but
when the weight was reduced to one, this was going too far, and it
was necessary to make the sesterce equivalent to four ases.
It is our duty attentively to investigate in what way the authors
through whom we derive our knowledge of ancient history, have
been led to the misunderstandings they have fallen into; and thus
to find :m excuse for their ·errors, instead of abusing them. This
like every act of dutifulness has its reward: for the discovery of the
place where they went astray from the right road, establishes its
coiirse. Pliny confounded the as which was employed to measure
the amount of the res grave, with the full-weighted coin. ·The
former was resorted to from necessity; since copper money was
used so far and wide, but in all varieties' of size: every where the
weight was reduced, owing to the same causes as at Rome; but,
inasmuch as it was in towns wholly independent of each other, the
reductions were different in different places •. All these moneys
were of the same metal; nor had a state any motive for forbidding
any coin but its own to circulate, since a seignorage was a thing
unknown to antiquity: 'accordingly a hundred pounds, whether in
the newest Roman money or in mixed sorts, were of the •same
value 1066 • , To bring these to a common standard was the end served
by the scales used in all bargains: these, as well as the witnesses,
had an important purpose, and were by no means a piece of sym­
bolical trifling. Had the old pounds continued undiminished, and
no others been current, the scales could never have been thought
of: payments would h~ve been by tale. · The weight supplied a
common measure for the national money and all these divers sorts;
and no less so for the old Roman coins, without any necessity of
melting them 'down, unless for every-day use; hence they might
continue to circulate. It is an utter misapprehension to attach
the name res grave to none but the heavier sorts: it bore the same
relation to minted ases, that pounds of silver do to pounds sterling~
When the currency became silver, and the· practice to count by

1066 That this is more than a bare possibility, and that the greatest variety
of pieces were in circulation at the ~ame time, is plain from the coins which
are often found in a single heap. ­
356. HISTORY OF ROME.

sesterces, this whole mode of reckoning ceased: from that time

forward wherever ases are spoken of, coined ones reckoned by tale
are meant: so that an antiquarian might very correctly say that in
the first Punic war the Romans passed from using pounds of cop­
per to using ases weighing the sixth of a pound: and then the mis­
take into which Pliny, or the author he followed, fell, lay close at
hand.
I return from this digression to treat of the census. Every
Roman was strictly bound to .make an honest return of his own.
person, his family, and his taxable property; and his neglecting to
do so was severely punished. , The Jaws also provided the means
for detecting false returns. All children on their birth were regis­
tered in the temple of Lucina; all who entered into youthhood in
that of Juventas; all the deceased in that of Libitina; ,all sojourners
with their wives and children, at th_e Paganalia: obsolete institu­
tions which Dionysins knew of only from the report of L. Piso1067.
All changes of abode or of landed property were to be announced
to the magistrates of the district, the tribunes or the overseers of
the pagi or vici: which Dionysius misinterprets into a prohibition
against any body dwelling without the region of his tribe 68 • In like
manner notice must have been given on every alienation of an arti­
cle liable to tribute ; and the purpose of the witnesses prescribed
by law, who confessedly represented the five classes, was at least
quite as much to trace the object of the sale for the census, as to
ensure the proprietor. One ·sees that these enactments 'made it
necessary that a good deal should be written; and for thi1:1 to ha~e
been done in the service of the state is not at variance with the
scarcity of books •
.h was by the plebs that the regular tax according to the census
was paid: its very name, tributum, was deduced from the tribes of
this order6 9• It was an impost varying with the exigencies of the
state, regulated by the thousands of a man's capital in the census;
but not a property-tax anywise corresponding to the income of the
tributary class: for the stories about the plebeian debtors plainly
show that debts were not deducted in the valuation of a fortune*.
It was a direct tax upon objects, without any regard to their pro­
duce, like a land and house tax: indeed this formed the main part
1067 IV. 15. 68 IV.14.
69 Varro de L. L. IV. 36. p. 49. Livy reverses this, saying, tribus ap­
pellatal a trilruto, i. 43. The tax was levied according to the tribes : Diony·
sius IV. 14: by the tribuni rerarii: Varro IV. 36.
* See the text to note 1287.
 . HISTORY OF ROME. 357

of it; included however in the general return of. the census 107°,
What must have made it peculiarly oppressive was its variable­
ness71, It did not extend below the assiduers: the proletarians
merely made a return of what they had. The notion of their pay­
ing a polltax is built on an unfounded interpretation of the t~ibutum
in capite, or more correctly in capita79 , which is mentioned as dis·
tinct from the tribute according to the census, and the nature of
which I believe will appear from the following explanation.
The purchase money for a knight's horse is called by Gaius te8
equestre78 : the right there was to distrain for it rieed not excite ap.y
doubt about Livy's statement, that it was paid out of the common
treasury; since the same summary process was granted against the
tribunus rerariu8 for the res militare74 • The annual provision for
a knight's horse the lawyer terms UJ8 l~ordearium. With regard
to the latter, Livy's account, that every knight received it from a
widow, sounds exceedingly strange: for, even if it was confined to
but a few hundred, so large a number of rich widows seems incon­
ceivable. In the first plac~ however the word vidua is to be un·
derstoo<l, after its original meaning, which is recognized by the
Roman jurists, -0f .every single woman generally, maiden as well
as widow7 5 ; and therefore of an . heiress (iwi1<>..npo~) : and besides

1070 Beside these two taxes, it embraced several, of those which in Eng­
land are called assessed taxes; only there were differences in the mode of raising
them. With regard to landed property at least the only possible method was
for a. survey to be taken according to regions, corresponding with the census;
so tha.t if an estate was sold to a Latin or a. Cwrite not ,esident a.t Rome, it
did not escape paying tribute, a.lthough the owner could not be cited in person.
71 The distress and weakness of Rome down to the passing of the Li·
cinian law are a memorable instance of .the evils that ensue from making a.
la.nd tax the chief source of national Te venue; more especia.lly when it is borne
by a. single class, which thus finds itself ip the same relation to such as a.re
privileged, as a. la.ndholder in a heavily taxed country to one where the bur­
thens are less.
72 Festus v. tributorum conlationem. As the tributum in capite stands
first in the list, it assuredly cannot ha.ve been insignificant. When, to show
the last honour to a. statesma.n, a. general decree of the people provided for his
furneral (p. 422) by levying a. qua.drant or sextant a. hea.d, this indeed was also
a. collatio in capita (Livy 11. 33), but of a.nother kind; a.nd the proletaria.ns ha.d
the honour of joining in contributing what even the poor could give.
'Z3 ___ .J.V;27. By the by, a.b eo qui distrilruebat cannot stand there, a.nd
must be changed into a.. e. q. <£S trilruebat.
74 Ca.to in Gellius vu. 10.
75 In consequence of the change that had a.lrea.dy taken pla.ce in the use
of the word, this expla.na.tion wa.s given by Labeo; in the a.bstra.ct of Ja.vole­
nus 1. 242. D. de verborwn signific. Vidua.m esse non solum earn quw a.Ii·
358 HISTORY OF ROME.

Livy has also forgotten the orphans. Cicero, in citing the example
of the Corinthians, among whom the knight's horse money was paid
by rich widows and orphans 10 7 8 , as the prototype of the Roman in­
stitution, obviously ascribes the same extent to the latter: and thus
we have a perfect explanation why the orphans and i.:dngle women
(orbi orb:eque) are mentioned apart in the populatio~ returns77, It
is true they did not come under the- general principle of. the nu­
meration: boys, who were not yet called out to military service,
could not stand in their own capacity registered in a census which
represented the muster-roll of an army with every thing belonging
to it; still less could women of whatever age; they could only be
set down under the caput of a father or husband. Ilut the pecu­
liarity in the mode of taxing them was the decisive cause of their
orn1ss10n. If the bachelors were bound to-pay on the same footing
with those two classes, as Camillus is said to have enacted, it can
only have been for a season7 8 : there was not the same cause here.
For in a military state it could not be e:;;teemed unjust, that the wo­
men and the children were to contribute largely for thos~ who
fought in behalf of them and of the commonwealth.
The same was reasonable with regard to those who ~ere de­
fended and protected .by the state without being·bound to military
service: for only such as belonged to a plebeian tribe came under
the regular annual conscription: others were called out merely in
extraordinary cases, and when civic legions were formed. If any
one was turned out of a tribe, he thereby lost the right of ser~ing
in the legion: levies were made according to the tribes 79 ; for which

quando impta fuisset, sed earn quoqne mulierem qure virum non habuis~et:
and even Modestinus still in his time says I. 101. eod. tit. Adulterium in
nuptam, stuprum in viduam committitur:
1076 De Re p. u. 20. .
71 The common phrase in Livy is; censa. sunt -civium capita,-prreter
orbos orbasque. ·
78 Plutarch Camill. c. 2. His notion that the orphans had previously
been exempt from tribute must go. for nothing.
79 Dionysius Iv.14._ I will transcribe this passage, which I have already
often referred to, in the manner in which it must be read and stopped: the
words in brackets are interpolations. Toil, d.rBpJ,,.ou' ~ .... ,,,, 'l"ov' h '""""'
f<OlP'f- .;,.,;;,,,..,., p.~ ..... Ad.p.~«vtlY '""P"' o-iJ<HO'SPo µn'T• iiA1'•81 71'0U 0-VJ'l"tAfir.

'T"'' 'l"t """"i'P"'<I>"' ,,..,, ""P""'°'"°''· J<«l ""' 1io-7l'p«,1i' """'· ;-oop.11«' ,,..,,
')(,pnp.«Toov th "" ""P«'l"leo'TlK-<t. ""' ...,., - t!AA«' ')(_pt1'.,.,, «~ tJ<<tcT'l"Of Uu "If'
"°'''!' 71'«fE)(,flV, [l<otl) ou11. fr1 """"' 'l"<H "P'j' <!>UA<t' ...,..,., ;-eri""'• [cr'Tp«'l"lll,.
'I"ll<«) ~' 7l'p6..-1pov, 'ti.7-.Atl l<<t'l"<t • ,,.,,_,- 'l"icrcr«p«' ""'' 'TO"'l""' (l<«lJ 'l"«C ~f>'
t@'l"•u i1«T«X,81{ct«' t11"0ltl'l"o. His error in taking the four civic tribes for
the only local one3 is of no consequence.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 359

reason moreover the century in the original legion consisted of

thirty men, one from each tribe; and was reckoned by the annals at
twenty for the time when the tribes were reduced to that number 1080 :
this principle of raising troops by the tribes lasted as long as there
was any distinction between the plebeians and rerarians. It ap­
pears probable to me that the centuries were so constructed as to
include all who in any manner of way bore the name of Romans:
although the exclusive oLligation of the plebeians to serve leads us
to suspect that originally they alone formed the classes. But be
this as it may, the clients of the patricians must have b.een admitted
into. them very early; for by their means their patrons exercised
great influence in the elections: nay, when the pkbeians made des­
perate by oppression withdrew from the comitia, the election might
still be concluded without apparent informality by the clients
alone 81 • At the same time they were so far from serving in the
legions, that, during the first disputes with the plebeians, the arm­
ing the clients in their stead is only talked of as a measure of ex­
treme necessity*. The story that in the earliest ages of.the consul­
ship the isopolites voted in the centuries, may be altogether apocry­
phal: still it shows what the ancient institutions were; just like the
above mentioned pretended pr<?tocols of solemn transactions under
the kings 89 • In later times every Italian, on complying with cer­
tain conditions, was entitled to remove to Rome and be registered
there; and, like the slave who received his freedom and secured it
by getting enrolled in the census with his master's consent, neces­
sarily acquired the civic franchise, without however thereby be-

In a war of little importance when only half a complete army was to be

sent out, the number of the tribes being then twenty-one, soldiers were levied
from but ten of them. Livy rv. 46. Decem tribus sorte ductre sunt; ex his
scriptos juniores tribuni ad helium duxere. ,
1080 The passages that prove this, as thei.r meaning would not be quite
clear yet, will be found below in note 10!)3.
81 See below notes 1307-1308. It is true the example in the former of
these notes, belonging to the times anterior to the decemvirate, may perhaps
have got into the annals from a confusion between two distinct states ofthings.
* Below note 1314. ·
82 See above p. 264. Unless indeed the story that Cassius wanted to
carry through his agrarian law by their mean~ originated with a very late
annalist, who transferred to that age the proceedings under the Gracchl .. If
the grounds for it existed in the pontifical books, this at least was forgotten,
that evidently the right of voting coiild only be exercised by such as were
settled at Rome with prope'rty equal to that of the class they Claimed to be­
long to. ~ee the text to note 365, vol. ir.
 360 HISTORY OF ROME.
coming the member of a' tribe*. But as to those early times we
are never likely to make out whether every town entitled to an
intercharge of franchise did not perhaps form a bond of hospitality
with some family or some house; ·whereby such of its citizens as
settled at Rome found a clientary relation already established,
which they were forced to adopt: or whether it was left to the op~
ti on of such Latins and Crerites to choose a .patron or to maintain
their own interests in person. At all events thus much is certain,
that they and the descendants of freedmen were rerarians, and were
not enlisted in the field-legions. .So that the exacting a higher tri­
bute from them was just as fair as from the purveyors for knights'
horses: and since their fortune was in the main of a totally dif­
ferent kind -from that of the plebeians or free landholders, being
the produce of commerce and trade, a different system was also ap­
propriate; that of taking an estimate of the property of each indivi­
dual1088, This arbitrary taxation arose so essentially from the cir­
cumstances of the order, that it was even ex(ltcised ag:iinst one of the
most illustrious Roman citizens, when the abuse of a formal official
right had degraded him from his tribe and placed him among the
rerarians: the census of Mam. JEmilius was octupled by the cen­
sors84. We may readily believe that every inhabitant also paid a
stated sum for protection; but it must have been very trifling: now
this, together with the rates imposed individually on the rerarians,
and the funds for knights' horses, must surely be the tributum in
capita spoken of8 5 •
To an arbitrary taxation of this kind must the commonalty have
been subjected .before the legislation of Servius, which substituted
the regular tribute according to the census i.n its stead; and hence

* Below note 1320.

1083 . They must have been subject to a tax somethi'ng like that on permits
for exercising trades, rated according to an estimate of the profits, such as
prevails under the name of Pate:ntes in France, of Pate:ntsteuer and Gewerb­
steuer in Germany.
84 Livy 1v. 24. Octuplicato censu rorarium fecerunt.
85 The commentator on the orations against Verres, wrongly called As­
conius; had correct information on this point: on the Divin. 3. Censores
cives sic notabant ut-qui plebeius esset in Croritum tabulas referretur et
rorarius fieret; ac per hoc non esset in albo centuriro sure (the century here is
taken as a pars tribus, see n. 1030); sed ad hoc esset civis tan tum ut pro capite
suo tributi nomine <era pe:nderet. The text here is garbled. The Laurent.
MS. LIV. 27, which Lagomarsini collated as being an authentic copy of
Poggio's transcript, reads: sed ad hoc non esset civis: tantum modo-ut p. c". s.
rora prtl',beret.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 361

came the story that down to this time a polltax was paid, and the
burthens of the poorest and the richest were equal1° 86 • This no­
tion is sufficiently absurd, even when the meaning is, that the state
was not to receive more from any citizen than the poorest could
afford ; but it is an almost unparalleled example of thoughtlessness
for any one to have set down in writing, that Tarquinius the tyrant
exacted a polltax of ten drachms ahead•1•. Here again however we
have a tradition, which ought not to be p_rejudiced by its sounding
so irrational in the mouth of the reporter. Dionysius confounds
the payer with the receiver. I shall show hereafter, that a hundred
ases were the monthly pay of a foot-soldier: for the present I will
express my conjecture, that this pay, the res militare, for which
the soldier had in like manner an immediate right of distraining,
was originally a charge on the rerarians, as the. funds for knights'
horses were on widows and infants : so that the rich had several to
satisfy ; while of the poorer sort several were clubbed together for
the suppor( of a single soldier. I am convinced that the very name
of the rerarian.y came from this res: and that the change which is
represented as the inttoduction of pay, consisted in its being no
longer confined, as it had previously been, to the existing number
of pensions chargeable upon the rerarians ; but so extended that
every sold.ier received his share: that now however the plebeians
also, along with the exclusive obligation to serve in the foot, were
likewise made universally aml regularly liable to tribute for paying
the army. And this was the view of those ann~lists more accu­
rately acquainted with ancient times, whom Livy follows when he
relates how the tribunes of the people murmured that the tri­
bute was only levied for the sake of ruining the plebs*: nor can
the measure imputed to Tarquinius be understood in any other
way.
As to the patricians one cannot suppose that they were taxed
like the rerarians: what befel Mam • .l.Emilius was an arbitrary im­
position. The other ranks might be satisfied, if the patricians paid

1086 Dionysius 1v. 43. T 1tp11.6vio, 11.«-ri.>.ucrt <r«' ,;.,,.~ 'T"'' 'Tlµnµ«<r"'' 1iir­
~·P"~' 11.otl'1'01 ~! ti.px.'i, 'Tpo,,.or ""'""'"-ri .. -r•.. •· 11.otl-To ; .. or J1ot~opo1 o ,,,..,,_
O'T«To' 'T'f "1''>.ou<T{tf ._,,Ji.pep1. He had already said what amounts to the
same thing under the reign of Servius Tullius. Livy too has: Censum insti­
tuit-ex quo belli pacisque munia non viritim, ut ante, sed pro habitu pecuni-.
arum fierent : 1. 42.
87 1v. 43. Tou 1~µ0'1111.ou ,,..,.,~Sou,-iv«;-11.«c!'oµlvou 11.«'I« '"'P".,.,"'lp11.x,­
µ«' Ji11.1t 1i.. .pip10.
* , See note l2JO.

1.-vv

362 IIISTORY OF ROME.

on the same footing with the plebeians for property of the same
kind, while for the national lands in their occupation they contri­
buted some adequate portion of the profits 1088 • That th~ was the
case under the kings, is probable even from the great public works,
the means for executing which were supplied according to the Roman
custom by the manubire; that is, partly by the produce from the
sale of booty; partly by the profits of the conquered lands, or the
rent charge on individuals for the usufruct allowed them. In after
times the patricians got rid of this charge; and hence, so long as
they were sole rulers, no building worth mention was erected89 •
The same law by which the plebeians· exclusively were bound
and called out to serve in the infantry, and' which regulated the ar­
mour every class was to wear, would of course forbid the rerarian's
to procure themselves a suit of armour. Even among the plebe~
ians; only the three upper classes were heavy armed: and since
every one had to equip himself at his own cost, .the poorer, above
all the proletarians, had not the means, of providing the arms and
armour without which they were no match for their richer brother
plebeians•. And though in those extraordinary cases where civic
legions were raised, and E;ven the artisans were enlisted, and where·
the proletarian moreover was armed by ihe state, necessity produced
·changes in tliis respect, they certainly did not outlast the occasion.
From the very large number of the centuries in the first class
Dionysius took it into his head,-and he has brought over all the
moderns to his opinion,-that at all event!! it had to pay very
dearly for its superiority in rank and weight; because it was inces­
santly under arms, and that too in a fat greater proportion than the
rest, making up nearly half the whole legion. Now though it is
true the early wars were not very bloody, any more so than those
of the Greeks were usually, before they took an entirely new cha­
racter with the Sicilian expedition; still, such as they w'ere, they
must speedily have led to a mere mob-government, if the flower of
the respectable citi.zens had thus been abandoned 'year after year
to destruction. w· e must not allow ourselves to impute an institu­
tion of this nature to the Roman law-giver; it is worth while how­
ever to show by other l;lrguments than moral ones, which by many

108& The payment of a tax on profits among the Romans was a decisive
proof that he who made it was only a usufructuary. The Greek notions on
this point were different: among them Pisistratus at the time we are speaking
of, Hiero three centuries later, exacted a tithe as a property-ta:i; from the land­
holders.
89 The tunnel from the Alban lake was a work enjoined by necessity.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 363

are little heeded, how far the opinion of Dionysius is from the
truth.
The phalanx, which was the battle-array of the ancient Greeks,
and which Philip merely adapted to the peculiar character of his'
subjects 1090, was the form in which the Roman armies als~ were
·originally drawn up 91 • The mo.de of arming the Servian centuries
too is Greek throughout, without a single distinguishing feature of
the Roman legioi1. The chief weapon, and indeed the only one
the lansquenet could use until the battle was won or lost, was his
spear; the .length of which, even before Philip introduced the
enormous sarissa,,seems to have allowed that the fourth line should
still employ it with effect; so that for every man in the first rank
four spear-heads were stretched out to meet the enemy. Here we
get an explanation of the differences in the defensive armour of the
Servian classes : where the second had no coat of mail, the third
neither this nor greaves. They might be spared the expense : for
their contingents made up the hinder ranks,' which were covered
by the bodies and weapons of the men before them. This fact,
that the first class formed the van, was known to Dionysius.
Among the hereditary forms which have long outlived their
causes, was the Roman practice of drawing up in file ten deep,
handed down from the time when every century had thirty. men.
If th:e phalanx was uniform, such a century stood with three men
in front: but if half of it was made up of men completely armed,
while the other half w·ere imperfectly so, it became necessary to
form each century into six half files, instead of three full ones ; so
that the half-armed should be stationed behind the men "in full

'1090 Had not the· Macedonians been barbarians, strong in body, rude in
understanding; had it not been clear that in such a nation there must inevi­
tably be a great scarcity of officers fit t6 be trusted with independent com­
mands; had not Philip's destructive .wars called for incessant supplies of raw
recruits, who were to be made serviceable without delay; this great prince
would assuredly have chosen a different system of tactics. But as it was he
turned the materials which he had at his command· to the best possible ac­
. count: and this was all he wanted; since the Greeks, whose array was the
same, persisted in that imperfect form of it, above which he had raised him­
self.
91 Livy vm. 8. Clypeis antea. Romani usi sunt: deinde, postquam sti­
pendiarif facti sunt, scuta pro clypeis fecere, et quod antea phalanges similes
Macedonicis, hoc postea manipulatim structa a.cies crepit esse. Dionysius in
his Jl.CCount of the c~nturies, and in th.ose ,of the earliest Roman wars, often
talks of the phalanx; and this .cannot arise merely from his wish to use a
Greek word for the legion: for in speaking of an Etruscan army he mentions
the force with which the phalanx drove the enemy down hill. .
364 HISTORY OF ROME.
armour, in the sixth and the following ranks 109 ~. Their mode of
acting in the phalanx was almost entirely mechanical, giving force
to its onset and compactness to its mass. If the number of centu­
ries furnished by the second and third class was only just the same
as what the junior.3 of those classes Yoted with, they formed merely
a third of the legion: the principle of the array would be the same;
but it would have been in nine ranks, to avoid broken or mixed
ones, which were contrary to the spirit of the ancient nations. And
indeed the proportion between the numbers might tempt us to as- .
sume that this was the array, instead of the one in ten ranks: but
we find a statement worthy of unconditional belief, which, rightly
explained and understood, proves that the latter was the true one,
and places the scale whereon the classes served with palpable evi­
dence before us.
· For this statement we are indebted· to the kind genius that has
taken occasions to all appearance accidental to preserve what, pro­
vided we are not lazy in searching, will always be substantially
sufficient to revive the image of antiquity. The plan of the Roman
consuls in the battle near Vesuvius to increase the strength of their
army by departing from the beaten track of the usual order of battle,
led an annalist well acquainted with ancient customs to describe
that order; and he did it so ably that, though Livy quite misunder­
stood what he was transplanting into his history, it may be com­
pletely restored. The arms had already been altered; the phalanx
resolved into maniples: but this resolution did not change its com­
position. No man ever conceived a greater invention, 'than he
who transformed tha.t inanimate mass and organized it into the
living body of a Roman legion; combining in it every variety of
troops, as in an army complete ~ithin itself, the absolute perfection ·
of a military division; prepared to overcome every battle-array and
every kind of troops, every form assumed by the spirit of war in
nations the most different from each other. But this too is one of
those great inventors whose names are buried for ever in obscurity:
and yet assuredly we read his name in the Fasti, although in his­
tory it is stripped of its most brilliant renown, even if, as there is
ground for suspecting, it was Camillus.

1092 Dionysius, vn. 591 says of the second class, 'TH1 u'll'o/J•fd•xvi11.1 'TaE11
ir 'Tei, µ•x,.ur 1Tx.1• of the third, 'Tff<•/AIL 11:.t,or l>.11.'J'Tor 'T,., 1 111 .,,p,.,, x11.l
.,.,;_;,, 'TH1 t?r' ix1iro". So in lv. 16, to the same effect, the youth of the first
class ;l(,oifll.V 1'.Gt'l'tl,:ti 'l'H1 fr'fOll.#'fll1l~Of<b•1 'Tii, 't&>.11.#'#'0' o>.u• t,hat of the Second
ixocr,utiTo ;, 'Toi, 11.'I',."'' ,u1-r11. Tou, 'll'f•(A.i)(.OIW of that of the third ,-,d,cr1s iir
,_.,.,.,,, -rou, i~IO''l'Ql'Tll.' iroig 7Tpop.ix,o".
 HISTORY OF ROME. 365
The time and place for. explaining this order of battle in de­
tail will occur hereafter. For the present those who have hitherto
found me as far remove.d from hastiness as from insincerity, will
take the following points as results, for the correctness of which
I am their pledge until I bring _forward my proofs. In the great
war with the Latins the Romans still served according to the classes,
.but no longer in a phalanx. The first class sent forty centuries,
the exact number of the junior v-0tes in it: thirty of these formed
the principes, ten were statione~ among the t~iarians: who must
doubtless have owed their name to their being made up .out of all
the three heavy-armed classes. The second and third in like man­
ner furnished forty centuries; twenty apiece, double the number
of their junior votes: ten of each score made up the hastates who
bore shields, and ten stood among the triarians. The fourth and
fifth class again supplied forty centuries: the former, ten, the has­
tates who carried javelins without shields; the latter, the thirty
centuries of the rorarians; which again was double the number of
its junior votes. . Here we have three divisions, each of twelve
hundred men: the first of hoplites in full armour; the second of
men in half armour; the third without any armour, the 40,of: and
we cannot fail to recognize that these forms belonged to the Roman
state in very remote ages :. for the centuries are supp'osed. to have
their full complement, according to the original scheme, that of
Servius, when there were thirty tribes 1098 , The anxiety to preserve
1003 At the time of the Latin war there were seven and twenty tribes;
and consequently just so m1J,ny aoldiers in a century: but this variable num­
ber would have given rise to perplexities .. To obviate misunderstanding, or
from his own uncertainty, Livy calls that part of the legion which in our
phraseology would be termed a battalion, by the indefinite words, acies, agmen;
instead of the true name, co/tort, which was afterward transferred to a very
differently constructed part.of the new legion. As the original number of the
tribes furnished cohorts of nine hundred men, they cannot, when the tribes
were reduced to twenty, have consisted ·of more than six hundred. '
This was rightly understood by the annalist who wrote that in the Volscian
war of the year 2!)2 four cohorts of six hundred men apiece were drawn up
before the gates of Rome: Dionysius IX. 71. In 2!.JO the legate P. Furius,
when the .lEquians were storming his camp, fell upon them with two cohorts
amounting to no more than a thousand men: ~....., J'I J'uo v·1nlpe1.1, oii 1n.1iov~
ti.vJ'p .. v i;t,ouvoc1 ;t,1~;.,,. where the translation of Gelenius dua cohortes quinge­
narite, which is meant to be free, introduces an erroneous notion. They con­
sisted of the principes, 600 instead of 900, and the heavy armed hastates,
400 instead of 600: Dionysius IX. 63. Again L. Siccius commands a cohort of
eight hundred veterans who were no longer liable to service; that is to say,
twenty from every senior century of the first class: Dionysius J. 43.
With such accuracy were these fiction• adapted to, the forms of ancient
366 HISTORY OF ROME.
numerical symmetry is again perceptible in the contingent of the
fourth class being no more than equal to the number of its junior
centuries; while in all the other three lower classes it doubles the
number of theirs : besides, being stationed among the light armed
troops, a greater number of them was not wanted, and indeed if
too great would have been an ipcumbrance. Now since the first
class supplied the same number of centuries as the next two be-·
tween thein, we get the proportion conjectured above for the pha­
lanx, five ranks of the former, five of the two latter .
.The number of the light infantry was half that of the troops in
the phalanx ; which agreed with the system of the Greeks. The
accensi stood apart from the phalanx and the caterua, as they did
apart from the classes. Their business being to take the arms and
the places of the killed or missing, was easily managed in such an
order of battle : for as soon as a gap was made, it was naturally
filled up by the man who stood just behind, and the next to him
advanced into his place ; so that the substitute had to come in far
back in the rear, where the mass of his comrades taught him per­
force to stand, to march, to face about, and hardly any thing was
wanted but strength of lit~b. well trained soldiers were' only
needed as serjeants and corporals, ot in the companies at the end
of the line, which by wheeling rouhd might become the head of a
column; and in some degree in the companies that stood near the
end. · i • ·

Now although the first class was so far from being drained out
of proportion to its numbers, that it rather look.I, which however
may be a mere delusion, as if the second had been unfairly dealt
with from the love of numerical symmetry; yet the former did not
gain its political privileges for nothing: for its centuries, as they
formed the front lines, stood the brunt of the fight. The knights
too purchased their precedence by a larger share of danger: for they
were defectively equipped, easily disarmed, and more exposed than
the rest to darts, and to the stones and lead of the slingers.
These hundred and twenty centuries standing under 'arms may
perhaps have given sanction to the testament which the soldier
made before battle : for in its original spirit this ceremony cannot
possibly have been a mere declaration before witnesses; but was just
as much a decree of acceptance by the community for the plebeians,
;

times : and thus the foregoing statements evince that both these propositions
were recognized as historically true-that originally there were thirty tribes,
and afterward only twenty. · ·
 HISTORY OF RO.ME. 367
as it was for the patricians when the curies legalized a testament or
an alteration of gentile rights. And thus I have no doubt that the
plebeian testaments were at first accepted in the comitia of the
classes, the exercitus vocatus, on the field of Mars: the place of
which assembly, so long as the affair was a mere formality, might
be filled by the lines in battle array, the viri vocati; although here
the votes were differently balanced*, This difference however,
and the neglect of the rights of the first cl3.$s 1 were far from imma­
terial, when,-what assuredly happened very much oftener than it
has been recorded,-a real law was to be passed in the camp: as it
is related that the decree of the. curies against the Tarquins was
confirmed by the army before Ardea. On such occasions therefore
the constitutional proportion among the s,everal classes was restored.
If .we call to mind .the state of things, all the senior centuries were
wanting:. the junior, when the double contingents. were reunited,
came to 85; and besides there were th~ five unclassed ones, making
ninety in all. Of these the first class with the carpenters had 41 ;
the other four with the four odd centuries 4~. Now a legion con­
tain~d 300 horsemen, or ten turrns; each. of which was equivalent
to a century of thirty men, and therefore no doubt voted like one :
so that in this way the knights and the first class together hacl 51
votes, and exceeded the lesser moiety by two: all together made up
just a hundred_. What were the circumstances· attending the law
in the camp at Sutrium, by which a duty of five per cent was im­
posed on manumissions, is a very perplexing question ; since it is
stated to have been passed by the tribes 109 4 , '
The regular comitia of the centuries of both ages assembled on
the field of Mars;. every ce~tury under its captain. Summoned by
the king, or by the magistrate who occupied his place, they deter­
mined o~ such· proposals of the senate concerning elections and
laws as were put to the vote by.the person who presided; with
perfect liberty to reject them; but ,their acceptance did not acquire
full force until' approved by the curies'. In capital caus~s, where
the charge concerned an offence against the whole nation, not a
violation of the rights of a particular o..-der, they decided alon~ 95 :
* See Velleius Paterc. 11. 5.. Plutarch Coriolan. c. 9.

1094 Tributim. Livy vu. 16.

95 This at least is represented by Dionysius, when relating the trial of

Coriolanus, to have been the principle of the constitution: vn. 59. On these
occasions they would be summoned by the duumvirs of, treason: and such
Dionysius conceives to have been the process against Sp. Cassius: vm. 77:
my scruples on which point I will bring forward in the proper place: see Vol.
n, note 366.
 368 HISTORY OF ROME.
at least after the time of the decemvirs. As it may be considered ,
unquestionable that the plebeians originally made their testaments in
the field of Mars, just as the patricians did in the Comitium; ·so it
would seem equally certain that, as an arrogation required a decree
of the curies*, the adoption of plebeians must have taken)lace before
the centuries. Nay the same may with great likelihood be conjec­
tured of every transaction for the formal completion of which five
witnesses were in aftertimes required. As the curies were repre­
sented by the lictorst, so were the classes by these witnesses, when
the consent of the comitia had become a ~atter' of course ; and
since the auspices; so long as the ancient customs prevailed, were
no doubt taken, at least in all transactions materially affecting per­
sonal relations, the formality was fully sufficient.
· The liberties of the commonalty, as forming a part of one branch
of the legislature, were confined to this, that, if the legitimate
course of things was not disturbed by force or by artifice, no na­
tional magistrate and no law could be thrust upon them against their
decided negative. Out of their own body no proposition could ori­
ginate; nor could any come forward and speak on the propositions
laid before them. So that the sacrifice made by the patricians at
this change was very "trifling: there is no trace which would lead
us to suspect that the senate was not composed of them exclusively;
and if at any tim'e a proposition offensive to their order was not­
withstanding brought before the centuries and accepted, there was
nothing to hinder the ·younger patres from. throwing itout in their

own comitia. On the other hand the patrician estate, and the gov­

ernment of which it formed the soul, possessed influence and means

for working on the centuries even within the narrow sphere of their

authority, partly by the votee of the rerarians~ partly by taking the

·assembly by surprise or tiring it out, so as to force decrees upon it

directly adverse to the will of the plebeians. ·
Nevertheless it is said that these slight restrictions, and the mea­
sures which, without withdrawing any thing from.the houses in the
other departments of government, merely gave the commonalty
freedom, .dignity, and 'respectability, were not conceded by the
patricians according to the t~gular forms'; so that the whole wears
the look of having been effected by the absolute power of the king:
it is said that they took away the king's life in an insurrection,
with which he had long been aware that they were threatening him.
·so runs the tradition: and that there. was at least a stubborn re­

* GelliuB v. rn. t Cic~ro de Leg. Agr. u. 12. (31).

 HISTORY OF ROME. 369

sistance on the part of the houses, we may presume with the same
certainty with which even contemporary memoirs could establish it.
For every oligarchy is envious, oppressive, and deaf to reason and
to prudence. Not that these qualities cleave to a class bearing any
particular name: it is the same spirit of oligarchy, under the smock­
frock of the yeoman of Uri, who not only denies the sojourner all
higher privileges, even though his forefathers have been settled in
the c::.nton for generations, but robs him of such bare common
rights as he has long enjoyed 1000 ; and under the velvet mantle of the
Venetian noble: the patricians in their conduct and character stood
very much nearer the former than the latter.
What the patricians wished to perpetuate against the plebeians,
was what the Spartans maintained against the Lacedemonians and
the 1r1plo11<01 : and the history of Sparta is the mirror of what the
Roman, but for the freedom of the plebeians, would have displayed.
As the Spartans did not repair their losses by admitting new citi­
zens, and did not spare their blood, they were reduced to so few,
that after Leuctra·their empire fell to pi~ces in an instant, and the
existence of the state was only preserved by the fidelity of a part of
the Laconians. This however did not awaken the conscience of
the Spartans; nor were their eyes opened when the greater part of
the surrounding country joined their hereditary foes; when they
found themsel\res living scattered about here and there in their 8pa­
cious city amid an alien or hostile population; when they were
forced to hire mercenaries for their wars, and to beg for subsidies
from foreign princes. Thus their state continued strengthless,
despised, and arrogant, dragging on an utterly morbid existence for
a century after its fall: at last, when not even a ray of hope was
left, its kings, to whom their country was not a matter of indif­
ference as it was to the oligarchs, endeavoured to save it by a revo­
lution which transformed those plebeians so long trampled under
foot into a new Lacedemonian people. In this people the Spartans
were merged., having in fact already become utterly insignificant:
and in their stead the Lacedemonians appeared for a while with
the splendour of ancient Sparta. Ilut it was too late: revolution
followed upon revolution, without any one condition lasting long
enough to be endowed by opinion and custom with the saving
power of legitimacy, which every constitution may acquire: the
time had long since been let slip, when the Spartans might have

10[)6 I take this instance, because just now, as I am writing this, it has
been brought forward in a remonstrance by the canton of the Grisons.
1.-ww
370 HISTORY OF ROME.
secured to their posterity every thing they felt pride in, and far
more, for as long a period as the mutability of human things will
allow.
To institutions like those of Servius the consent of the· order
which afterward overthrew them, could not have been obtained
except in semblance, by force or fraud. There was more frankness
in the dealings of a prince, who felt himself called by .heaven to
decide what was fair and just before the tribunal of his own con­
science, instead of letting it'.rest with the parties to be judges in their
own cause: their claim to be so was founded on rights, of which the
real substance had undergone ·a change, and the continuance was
only nominal and apparent.
The well establised right of the indviduals who composed the
oligarchy to exercise the government, held only for that sphere
within which their ancestors had enjoyed it; here too it had been
narrowed in the same proportion in which they had sunk below
their forefathers in number, importance, and force : and that which
had become extinct among them, had transferred itself to the quarter
where a new life had risen up. If they wished to preserve their
own corporation unchanged, they were bound to replenishitand keep
it fresh and full. As to the entirely new growth which had sprung
up and was flourishing iµdependently of that sphere, they had no
manner of right over it: and whatever share in such a right might
be granted them by compact was so much pure gain for them.
It is no encroachment on that which is already existing, for a
new existence to awaken beside it: it is murder, to stifle the stirrings
of this life; murder and rebellion against Providence. As the most
perfect life is that which animates the most complex organization;
so that state is the noblest, in which powers, originally and defi­
nitely distinct, unite after the varieties of their kind into centres
of vitality, one beside the other, to make up a whole. The mea·
sure adopted at Athens indeed was unjust and mischievous, when
Clisthenes, one of the nobles, from a grudge against his own order,
by transforming the tribes levelled the distinction of· ranks, and
introduced .an equality which led to a frantic democracy; Athens
being unaccountably preserved by. fortune from falling under the
dominion of tyrants. But Servius in no way trenched on the liber­
ties of the Romans; those slowly earned liberties, with regard to
which it was now forgotten that the minor houses and the secondary
centuries were at first no less destitute of them, than the commonalty
was now.
The time too came~ when the manes of the proud patricians,
 HISTORY. OF ROME. 371

wan<lering among their late descendants, and beholding the great­

ness achieved by them and by the whole republic through those
very laws the introduction of which had so roused their indigna­
tion and seduced them into insurrection and into high treason, must,
if indeed their country had been truly dear to them, have con­
fessed and been penitent for their blindness. Without these laws
Rome like Etruria might have become powerful for a season; but
her power must in like manner have been brief: like Etruria she
would have been unable to form a regular infantry: while the power
of the Samnites, founded on their noble body of foot, would have
approached nearer and nearer to Rome, and, before they met, would
have preponderated.
If this constitution now, along with the laws connected with it,
such as they are ascribed to Servius, had continued to subsist, Rome ·
would have attained two centuries sooner and without sacrifices to
'a happiness, which, after the main part of what was granted had
been torn away, cost her hard contests and bitter sufferings before
she finally reached it anew. It is true, if the story of a people is
like a life ; if the weal of one age makes amends fot the woe of
another, without which it could never have come to pass; then no
harm was done to Rome by the delay: the putting off the comple­
tion of the constitution also put off its downfal, and the deprave­
ment of the nation for no short time; and her hard struggles dis­
ciplined and trained her. But woe to them by whom the offence
cometh! and a curse upon those, who, so far as in them lay, de­
stroyed the freedom of the plebeians !
L. TARQUINIUS THE TYRANT, AND THE
BANISHl\IENT OF THE TARQUINS.

Tms destruction was the work of the usurper, this the price for
which h_is compl_ices allowed him to rule as king, without even the
bare show of a confirmation by the curies. Every right and privi­
lege conferred by Servius upon the commonalty was !:!wept away;
the assemblages at sacrifices and festivals, which had tended above
all other things to cement them into united bodies, were prohibited;
the equality of civil rights was abolished, and the right of seizing
the person of a debtor re-established: the rich plebeians were sub­
jected, like the sojourners, to arbitrary taxation: the poor were
kept at task-work with sorry wages and scanty food, and these
hardships drove many to put an end to themselves*.
Soon however the oppressed had the wretched solace of seeing
the exultation of their oppressors turned into dismay. The senators
and men of rank were, as under the Greek tyrants, the object most
exposed to the mistrust and the cupidity of the usurper: after the
manner of those tyrants )le had formed a body-guard, with which
he exercised his sway at pleasure. Many lost their lives; others
'Yere banished, and their fortunes confiscated: the vacant places
were not filled up: and even this senate, insignificant as its small
number made it, was never called together.
Though Tarquinius was a tyrant, and as bad a one as any among
the Greeks of the same age 1097 , he was no less capable than any of
these to engage in great enterprises for the splendour of his country;
and fortune long continued to favour him : indeed the goddess
might easily prosper the undertakings of one whom no scruple

* Cassius Hemina. in Servius on lEn. xu. 603. Pliny xxxv1. 24.

1097 Those of the Ma.cedonia.n age, mostly the leaders of profligate mer­
cenaries, were a mu~h worse breed than the earlier ones before _the Pelopon­
nesian war. '
 HISTORY OF ROME. 373
deterred from making use of whatever would best further his
designs. In Latium,his influence was widely spread, by means of
Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum, to whom he had given one of his
<laughters in marriage: and Turnus Herdonius of Aricia, who con­
jured the Latms not to trust themselves to him, was condemned to
death by their national assembly on a false accusation brought by
Tarquinius; some arms, which had been conveyed into his lodging
by treacherous slaves, appearing to convict him of guilt. Latium
bowed beneath the majesty of Rome; and thenceforward it was the
office of the Roman king to sacrifice the bull at the Latin/eria: upon
the Alban mount before the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, in behalf of
all the allies, every city receiving a portion of the flesh. Each sent its
stated share to this sacred festival, lambs, milk, cheese, cakes: they
were holidr.ys full of primitive merrim'ent, for which the folly of
later times devised a symbolical meaning: the swinging puppets for
instance were to commemorate how when Latinus disappeared he
was sought after in the air as well as upon the earth. The Her­
nicans too did homage to the king, and joined in this festival: but
their cohorts were kept apart from the legions which they accom­
panied, and which were composed of•Roman and Latin centuries
united into maniples •
. The first place attacked by fhis army was Suessa Pometia, the
most flourishing of the Volscian cities, rich from the possession of
wide and luxuriantly fertile plains, the granary of Rome in years of
scarcity. It was taken: the inhabitants, freemen and slaves, were
sold with all their substance; and the tithe of the money produced
was devoted to building the Capitoline temple, which the king's
father had vowed in the Sabine war.
The foundations of this temple consumed the spoils of Pom.etia;
and heavy taxes were needed, and hard task-work, to pursue the
building. Ever since the time of Tatius the Capitoline hill had
been full of altars and chapels, small consecrated spots, a few feet
square; severally dedicated to a variety of deities, who could not
be displaced from their abodes without the consent of the auspices.
To the union of the three highest beings in the Etruscan religion,
Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, they all gave way, save Juventas and
Terminus: a token that the youth of the Roman empire would
never fade, its boundaries would never fall back, so long as the
pontiff should mount the steps of the Capitol with the silent virgin
in honour of the gods*. The name of. Capitol was given to the

* Livy v. 54.
37'1 lllSTURY OF ROME.
temple, and from it to the Tarpcian hill, in consequence of a hu­
man head found by the workmen as they were digging the founda­
tions, which was undecayed and trickling with blood: a sign that
this place was destined to become the head of the world.
Within this temple, in Jupiter's cell. under ground, the Sibyl­
line books were preserved. An unknown old woman had offered
to sell the king nine books for three hundred pieces of gold : being
treated with scorn she burnt three, and then three more, and was
on the point of destroying the others, unless she received the same
price for them which she had asked for all. The king repented
of the incredulity that had lost him the greater part of an irreplace­
able treasure : the prophetess gave him the last three books, and
vanished.
The expedition against Pometia was. the beginning of the wars
against 'the Volscians, which .fill the early annals of the republic:
in the conquered territory Tarquinius founded two colonies, Signia
and Circeii.
The greatness of Gabii in very ancient times is still apparent in
the walls of the cell of the temple of Juno; and Dionysius saw it
yet more conspicuous in the ruins of the extensive wall by which
the city, standing in the plain, had been surrounded, and which had
been demolished by a destroying conqueror, as well as in those of
several buildings. It was one of the thirty Latin cities ; but it
scorned th~ determination of that confederacy,-wherein those were
equal in votes wh.o were far from equal in power,-to degrade
themselves: .hence began an obstinate war between it and Rome.
The contending cities were only twelve miles apart; and the coun­
try betwixt them endured for years all the evils of military ravages,
no end of which was to be foreseen: for within their walls both
were invincible.
Sextus, the tyrant's son, pretended to rebel: the king, whose
anger seeme<l to have been provoked by his wanton insolence, con­
demned hiin to a disgraceful punishment as if he had been the
meanest of his subjects. He came to the Gabines under the mask
of a fugitive: the bloody mark of his stripes, and still more the in­
fatuation which comes over men doomed to perish, gained him be­
lief and good will: at first he led a body of volunteers ; then troops
~ere trusted to his charge: every enterprise succeeded ; for booty
and soldiers were thrown in his way at certain appointed places :
'and the deluded citizens raised the man, under whose command
they promised themselves the pleasures of a successful war, to the
dictatorship. The last step of his treachery was yet to come: none
 HISTORY OF ROME. 375
of the troops being hirelings, it was a hazardous venture to open a
gate. Sextus sent to ask his father in what way he should deliver
Gabii into his hands. Tarquinius was in his garden when he re·
ceived the messenger: he walked along in silence, striking off the
heads of the tallest poppies with his stick, and dismissed the man
without an answer. On this hint Sextus put to death or by means
of false charges banished such of the Gabines as were able to op·
pose him: by; distributing their fortunes he purchased partisans
among the lowest class; and acquiring the uncontested rule brought
the city to submit to his father.
But the security of uninterrupted good fortune was disturbed by
an appalling prodigy: a serpent crawled out from the altar in the
royal palaces 1098, and seized on the flesh brought for sac{ifice. It
was the time when the Pythian oracle was in the highest repute:
the king sent his sons Titus and Aruns with costly gifts to Delphi9 9,
to learn what was the clanger that menaced him : 'the priestess, whose
suggestions gave strength and copfidence only to those forebodings
whereby we are to explore and find out our way through the dark·
ness of our destinies, while they mislead those who were without
such feelings, answered, that he would fall, when a dog should
speak with a lmman voice 1100 • The person <lesignated by the god
was standing with the envoys in the temple; having propitiated
him with the gift of a golden stick, incloscd and concealed in a hol­
low wooden one. The sister of king Tarquinius, wedded to M.
Junius, had borne two sons, whom their father left behind under
age: the elder was put to death by the tyrant for the sake of his
wealth: the younger, Lucius, saved his life by putting on a show
of stupidity; he ate wild figs and honey 1• The Romans like other
nations fooked upon a madman as sacred; and Tarquinius, as his
guardian, enjoyed his idiot kinsman's fortune: this L. ,Junius, hence
called Brutus, had accompanied the young Tarquins to Delphi.
When the youths had performed their commission, they inquired

1098 Ovid Fast. II. 711. Or out of a pillar. Here again forgers, on the
look out for something possible, turned the altar into a colmnna lignea. Livy
1. 56. Dionysius has a pestilence as the 'cause of the mission to Delphi.
!)!) Cicero de Re p. 11. 2-1. 1100 Zonaras n. 11.
I Albinus in Macrobius II. 16. Stultum sese brutumque faciebat;
grossulos ex melle edebat. There cannot be a livelier wayofexpressingfohy,
in an age that has not yet Jost its primitive simplicity. Our language has no
word for grossi, the fruit of the wild fig tree, used in caprification, as it is ex­
plained by Niclas on the Geoponics, p. 2:l8, from Pontedera. In comparison
to the figs we eat they are as unp:datable, as wild fruits are compared with
g~rden fruits of the same kind.
370 HISTORY OF ROME.

of the oracle in their own behalf, who was to rule at Rome after
their father. Ile that.first kisses his mother, answered the priestess.
The princes agreed to decide the matter by lot, and to keep it a
secret from Sextus : Brutus in running down the hill fell, and his
lips touched the earth, in the centre of which Pytho, its primitive
sanctuary, stood.
Other prodigies and dreams harassed the king. Some eagles
had built their nest on a palm in his garden: ·they had flown out to
fetch food; meanwhile vultures came in great numbers to the nest,
tossed out the unfledged eaglets, and drove away the old birds on
their too tardy return. He dreamt that two rams sprung from one
sire were brought to him before the altar; that he chose the finest
for the s~crifice ; the other pushed him down with its horns : at the
same time the sun changed his course and turned back from the
West toward the East*. In vain was he warned by the inter­
preters of dreams against the man whom he deemed simple as a
sheep: in vain did the voice of the oracle concur with the nightly
vision: fate must have its way.
Ardea, the city of the Rutulians, refused to submit to the king,
and was besieged with a large force. It stood upon an insulated
volcanic hill, with sides cut sharply down: where the rock was
low, it ~as surmounted by walls built of square blocks of tufo. A
fortress of this kind would have been impregnable even to the im­
proved engineering of those later times, when the mechanical arts
were carried to perfection as the gifts of genius and oratory had been
before: unless towers could be built of the same height with the
rock and driven close up to the foot of it: but in those days, except
treachery lent its aid, famine was the only means of reducing a
place, which could neither be scaled or undermined. Hence the
Roman armr lay idle in its tents before Ardea, until the Rutulians
should have consumed their provisions.
Here as the king's sons and their cousin L. Tarquinius were
sitting over their cups, a dispute arose on the virtue of their wives.
This cousin, who was surnamed from Collatia, where he dwelt
invested with the principality 1102, was the .grandson of Aruns, that
elder brother of the first Tarquinius, after whose death Lucumo re­

* Attius, quoted byCicero de Divinat. 1. 22.

1102 Egerius, his father, lived there as governor: Livy 1. 38. That is to
say, the poem related this, to explain how Collatinus and Lucretia happened
to reside there: so here again it is evident that the genuine old form of the
story has been preserved by Livy, not by those who removed their abode to
Rome.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 377
moved to Rome. Nothing was going on in the field : they moun­
ted horse straightway to visit their homes by surprise: at Rome the
princesses were revelling at a banquet, surrounded by flowers and
wine:. from thence the youths hastened to Collatia; where at the
late hour of the night Lucretia was spinning in the circle of her
handmaids.
It was not the bloodthirstiness, nor the avarice of the tyrants
of antiquity, that was the most dreadful evil for their subjects: it
was, that whatsoever object had aroused their fierce passions, were
it a wife, a maiden, or' a boy, death alone could save it from shame.
Outrages, such as Lucretia suffered, happened daily; just as the
Christians under the Turkish empire are exposed to them without
any protection; and always were so, before any one yet thought
on the possibility of breaking the accursed yoke: but the daughter
of Tricipitinus was of noble birth, and this was the ruin of the
Tarquins. Inflamed by wicked lust, Sextus went back the next
day to Collatia., and according to the rights of gentile hospitality
was lodged in his kinsman's house. At the dead of night he entered
sword-in-hand into the chamber of the matron; and by threatening
that he would lay a slave with his throat cut beside her body,
would pretend to have avenged her husband's honour, and would
make her memory for ever loathsome to the object of her love,
wrung from her what the fear of death could not obtain.
Who after Livy can tell of Lucretia's despair 1103 ? She entreated
her father and her husband .to come to her; for horrible things had
taken place. Lucretius came accompanied by P. Valerius, who
afterward gained the name of, Publicola; Collatinus with the out­
cast Brutus. They found the disconsolate wife in mourning attire,
sitting in a trance of sorrow : they heard the tale of the crime, and
swore to ave~ge her: over the body of Lucretia as over a victim
they renewed the oath of their league. 'fhe moment was arrived
for Brutus to cast off his disguise, as Ulysses threw off the garb of
the beggar. They bore the corpse into the market-place of Collatia:
the citizens renounced Tarquinius, and vowed obedience to the de·
liverers. Their young men attended the funeral procession to
Rome. Here the g~tes were closed, and the people convoked by
Brutus as tribune of the Celeres. All ranks were inflamed by one
single feeling: with one voice the decree of the citizens deposed
1103 Dionysius relates it with great discrepancies, and far worse. It is
more interesting to compare Ovid's very finely wrought but heartless narra­
tive (Fast. 11. 685-B52,) with the noble account in Livy, which crowns his
first book, the masterpiece of his whole history.
1.-xx
3i8. HISTORY OF ROME.

the last king from his throne, and pronounced the sentence of ban­
ishment upon him and his family. Tullia fled from the city unhurt:
the people left her punishment to the spirits of those whom she
had murdered.
On the tidings of an insurrection the king broke up with a few
followers for Rome : but the city was shut against him: meanwhile
Brutus marched with some volunteers by a by-way to the camp.
All bickerings with the patricians, every wrong, all distrust was
forgotten : the .centuries of the army confirmed the decree of the
curies. The deposed king, with his sons Titus and Aruns, took
refuge in Cmre, where Roman exiles were entitled to settle as
citizens*: Sextus went back to Gabii, as to his own principality:
ere long this audacious act afforded the friends of those who had
perished by his means, the opportunity of taking vengeance for
their blood.
A truce was concluded with Ardea, and the army returned to
Rome. The centuries by a formal decree in the field of Mars con­
firmed the resolution of the curies and of the army; banished Tar­
quinius and his detested house for ever; abolished for ever the dig­
nity of king; and outlawed every one who should dare to frame a
wish of ruling as king at Rome. This was sworn to by the whole
nation for themselves and their posterity. The laws of king Ser­
vius were re-established: bondage for debt :was again prohibited;
the right of the plebeians to assemble according to their tribes and
regions was recognized; and, as the'. same code liad prescribed, the
royal power was entrusted to two men for. the term of a year. The
centuries chose Brutus and Collatinus consuls: the curies invested
them- with the imperium.
From Crere, where the banished prince had only found a retreat,
he repaired to Tarquinii: here ['.llU ,to the Veientines he offered the
districts which Rome had conquered from them. Etruscan embas­
sadors were sent to demand his restoration from the Roman sen­
ate; or at least that they should be responsible for his property,
and that of all who had left their. homes to follow him: these were
numerous 1104 , and the members of powerful families. The curies 5­
for the decision rested with them; as what was confiscated went to

. See above, pp. 247. 295.

1104 That they were so considered in the tradition, is evident from this
among other grounds, that in the accounts of the battles the Roman emigrants
appear as a separate body. See the text to note 1230.
, 5 · Dionysius v. 6.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 379

the estates of the burghers 11n6-resolve<l to give up the property.

This afforded the ambassadors time to excite a conspiracy, in which
the Vitellii, with their sister's children, the two sons of Brutus, an<l
the Aquillii, who were akin to Collatinus, were involve<l along
with many others. Many regretted the loss of that license for their
vices, which their birth and connexions gave them under. the Tar­
quins: not a few may perhaps have found the liberties of the ple­
beians more grating than all the misdeeds of the tyrant. An honest
slave, who perceived that mischief was brewing, became an unob­
served ear-witness of their last conference, for which the complices
had met together in a dark chamber: few rooms in the Roman houses
had any light except when the door was open. On his information
the conspirators were seized, and early in the morning, when the
consuls were sitting at justice in the Comitium ami<l the assemble<l
citizens, were brought bef<'.lre them. Brutus condemned his sons
to death in his capacity of a father, ·from whose sentence there was
no appeal: the_ manner of inflicting it he determined according to his
duty as consul. 'J'.he other criminals, as patricians, had the right of
appealing to the curies; but such a sentence from a father made
weakness impossible: they were all beheaded.
The agreement to give up the property was annulled by this
attempt to foment treason: it became clear too that freedom could not.
be sec:urely established except by the fidelity of the commonalty.
The chattefa of the Tarquius were abandoned to the mob to plun­
der: their landed estates and the royal demesnes were parcelled out
among the plebeians: the field between the city and the river was
consecrated to Mars, the father of Rome. Harvest-time came on;
to take the sheaves seemed to be a sin: they were thrown into the
river, the waters of which are shallow in summer: by running
against each other their course was checked, and they accumulated
so as to form the foundation of an island, which seven generations
after became the seat of the Epidaurian god.
The whole Tarquinian house was banished: even Collatinus
had to lay down his office and to leave Rome; he did not join the
enemy, but died at Lavinium. P. Valerius was appointed in his
stead.
A large army of V eien tines and Tarquiniaus advanced .with the
Tarquins: the Romans marched out to meet them. The Etruscan
cavalry wa:i headed by Aruns Tarquinius, the Roman by Brutus:

1106 The very phrase in publicum rtdigere implies that it was confiscatPd
for the populus. · ' , ·
380 HISTORY OF ROME.
both of them gallopped on before the legions, and encountered: both
fell mortally wounded. Then the infantry took up the battle, and
fought until night parted them: both armies were equally worn out,
and neither would own itself vanquished. About midnight how·
ever they both heard the voice of the wood-genius out of the neigh·
bouring forest of Arsia, declaring that the victory belonged to the
Romans; for on the Etruscan side one more had fallen. It was a
voice of the kind by which panic terrors were spread. The Etrus·
cans fled: when the dead were counted, eleven thousand three hun­
dred Etruscans were lying on the field; the Romans were fewer by
one*. P. Valerius returned to the city in triumph: on the next day
he solemnized the obsequies of Brutus. The matrons mourned a
year for him as for a father: the republic erected a bronze statue to
him in the Capitol, with a drawn swQrd, in the midst of the seven
kingst.
Valerius was dilatory in procuring the election of a successor to
Brutus, and was moreover building a stone house on the top of the
Velia, where Tullus Hostilius had resided-near S. Francesca Ro·
mana,-and where from the Forum it had the look of a castle: this
excited a suspicion that he aimed at usurping kingly power. His
innocence kept him unconscious of this: when told ofit he stopped the
b'uilding: the people, ashamed and penitent, granted him a piece of
ground at the foot of the ascent up the Velia, and, as a perpetual
mark of their gift, the privilege of having his doors open back into
the strcet:j:.
The object of Valerius in wishing to remain alone in the consulate,
was that he might no.t have a colleague, whose opposition would be
an insuperable obstacle, to impede him in enacting laws for restrain·
ine the consular power within fixed bounds; such as with regard to
the regal, the origin of which lay beyond the age of written ordi·
nances, had only existed by custom, and had often been transgressed.
He acknowledged that the curies were the source of his power, and
that the consuls owed homage to the majesty of that assembly, by
lowering the fasces before it; for which act he received the name of
Publicola. Jn like manner it was an acknowledgement of the right
of the plebeians to appeal to the tribunal of their own order from
sentences of corporal punishment pronounced by the consul .on the
strength of his plenary authority, when it was settled that thence·
' .

* Plutarch Publicol. c. 9.

t Dion. Cassius XLln. 45. Plutarch Brut. c. I.

t Plutarch Publicol. c. 10. Pliny H. N. xxxv1. 24.

 HISTORY OF ROME. 381

forward there should be no axe in the bundle of rods carried before

him within the city. As soon as the Valerian laws were passed,
Publicola transferred the fasces to Sp. Lucretius as his senior.
Lucretius did not live to the end of the year: it was closed by his
successor M. Horatius, who at its expiration was called a second
time to the consulate along with P. Valerius.
Ill blood was excited between the two colleagues by the desire of
each to leave an enduring memorial of his name. The Capitoline
temple, which was incomplete when Tarquinius was driven from
the throne, had been finished under the consuls; and it had been
decided by lot that 1\1, Horatius should dedicate it. At the moment
that he was grasping the doorpost, and about to pronounce the
solemn w9rds, l\1. Valerius, the consul's brother, came to him with
these false tidings of sorrow: 0 ~Marcus, what art thou doing! be­
hold, thy son lieth dead. A word of lamentation would have broken
off the ceremony: Horatius, firm as Brutus, made answer: Cast
away the body; it concerneth not me. Thus he accomplished the
dedication; and his name was read on the entablature of the portico
until the destruction of the temple in the time of Sylla. The ides
of September, on which he had consecrated it, formed the com­
mencement of the era for keeping account of. which a nail was driven.
in there on the same day of every year.
Among the works of art with which the last king had meant to
decorate this temple, was a four-horsed chariot of baked clay, des­
tined to be placed at top of the pediment. This piece, which was
to be executed by an artist at Veii, swelled out so prodigiously in
the fire, that it was necssary to break open the furnace in order to
take it out. Such a marvel would have been deemed of unequivo­
cal import. even among a people less familiar with the ways of
destiny than the Etruscans: accordingly the Veientines refused to
deliver up the chariot to the Romans;. pretending that it had not
been made for the state, but for Tarquinius. The gods however
would not allow Rome to be robbed of a work, which they had
purposed should be a token of her fate. During the next Circen­
sian games at Veii the horses that had been victorious darted away
impetuously to Rome; and at the foot of the Capitol, near the
Porta Ratumena, the name of which came from this Etruscan 1107,
dashed their driver lifeless to the ground. Foreboding that a like

1107 The penultimate is long; for it has the common termination of Tu•­
ean gentile names, Hke Vibenna, Ergenna. See note 922..
 382 HISTORY OF ROME.
misfortune would turn all their festivals into mourning, the Veien·
tines were fain to comply with the Roman people 1108 •
The thought of being inclebted to the tyrant for this temple, the
chosen seat of the highest gocls, ancl, long before the time when it
surpassed that at Delphi in riches, the most splendid ornail1ent of
Rome, was repugnant to the feelings of the later Romans: it seemed
to them too as if those happy signs of the future which manifested
themselves while the builcling was rreparing, could only be revealecl,
as if those prophetic books which were to guide the public in times
of great embarrassment, could only be vouchsafecl, to one who had
found favour with the gods. Hence the laying the foundations at
least of the Capitol, together with the omens of a universal empire
and of its eternity, were assigned l/y many, the visit of, the Si by1
by some, though but a few, to the father, L. Tarquinius Priscus.
Earlier ages were of a different way of thinking: to them it was
no stumbling-block, that the higher powers should show favour
even to a reprobate, who was observant of their service, until the
measure of his guilt was filled; or that they should allow such a
man to convey their blessings to a people whom they loved: was
the people to suffer, because the gods themselves had not the power
of commanding N attire to endow its rulers with virtue?
· · In all the accounts however the building of the Capitol is con­
nected by a vow with the Sabine war of the first Tarquinius: but
the older legend confined itself to this 9 • The most lying of all the
annalists• 0 , Valerius Antias, by a clumsy transfer from the tradition
about Suessa Pometia, fabricated the story that king Priscus ob·
tained the means of executing the substructions from the spoils of
the unknown Latin town, Apiolm 11 • In order that the work might
not continue at a stand through the whole reign of Servius Tullius,
and"yet at the same time that the people might not seem to have been
oppressed under him, a further expedient was devised, perhaps by
1108 Plutarch Publicol. c. 13. The groundwork of the legend is the same
in Festus v. Ratumena porta; only a different story is there made of it. The
Veientines are compelled by arms to deliver up the chariot; and it has al­
ready been erected when the horses run away; at the sight of it they stand
still.
9 Thus in Cicero de Re p. 11. 20, it is said of Priscus, <edem in Capito­
lio faciendam vovisse: and u. 24, of Superbus, votum patris Capitolii <edifica·
tione persolvit. David too only made the vow: the temple was built from the
ground by Solomon.
10 Adeo nullus mentiendi modus est, says Livy of him: xxv1. 49. ·
11 Pliny H. N. ur. 9. Strabo v. p. 231. a.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 383

the same writer: Servius was said to have carried on the building
by employing the labour of the alliesll 12•
The site of the Capitoline temple was on the lower summit of
the Tarpeian hill, now called. .JJJonte Caprino, which is separated
from the .11.rx, where .11.ra Cefi1 3 stands, by a hollow at present
almost imperceptible 14• There was not a flat surface here large,
enough: so it was gained, as on Mount Moria, by levelling the
peaks, and by walling in a certain space, and then filling it up: works
which in cost of labour are not inferior even to the buildings of the
temple. .On this area a basement of considerable height was
erected, eight hundred feet in compass; it was nearly an equilateral
quadrangle, the length being not fifteen feet greater than the breadth.
The triple sanctuary of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, underneath the
same roof, with party.walls to separate them, was surrounded by
rows of pillars; a triple colonnade on the south, a double one on
the other sides15• Beyond a doubt the whole temple was built of
peperino: the pillars were of blocks, which can hardly have been
even masked with 1>tucco: no marble can have shone from its walls:
the doors were certainly of brass; so perhaps was the roof. As­
suredly it was not a less noble building than the temples of Pres­
tum; majestic in its simple grandeur, the course of ages and the
victories of three hundred years gradually arrayed it in all that was
splendid and precious. The artists who built and embellished the
Capitol, were sent for out of Etruria' 6 : the severity of the ancient
Italian principle, which would not tolerate any corporeal represen­
tations of the gods, had already been overpowered by the influence
of Greece.
The tradition that the du.umvirs who had the care of the Sibylline
books 17 "'.ere instituted by the last Tarquinius, is evidently derived
from the pontifical or artgural records, like the statements concern­
ing the establishment of the priestly offices by Numa. When we
look at it historically, it seems that the original appointment of a
duumvirate taken from among the patricians must have been prior
to the opening of the Vestal priesthood and of the senate to the

, 1112 Tacitus Hist. 111. 72. Servius Tullius sociorum studio.

13 Which name seems to be a corruption of Arx.
14 This view was that of all the older and better topographers before
Nardini: to me it was first imparted by Hirt. See his Dissertation on this
temple in the Berlin Transactions for 1812-1813.
15 Dionysius 111. W. iv. 61. 16 Livy I. 57.
17 References to the pas•ages that speak of the Sibylline oracles may
easily be foun<l in Fabricius Bibi. Grrec. ed. Harl. 1. p. 248. foll. '
384 HISTORY OF ROME.

third tribe: for unquestionably it is improbable that after that time

it would be excluded from the custody of foreign objects of reli­
gious reverence, wherein the plebeians were allowed to take part
sooner than in the consulate and the higher colleges of priests : and
the improbability is heightened by the Tarquins having belonged to
that tribe. But when the question lies between the father and son,
this objection goes too far: and the lesser houses may possibly have
been represented by one of the duumvirs, just as the Tities were
by one of the two who held the other priestly offices.
That the Sibylline oracles kept in the Capitol made. up three
books, and consequently that by the tenor of the legend nine were
brought to the king, seems to follow from the keepers of them
being charged to look into the Sibylline books; in opposition to
Pliny's statement that two of them were burnt, and only orie re­
tained111s. After they had been consumed in the time of Sylla, their
guardians may have ventured to tell what pl'eviously must not have
crossed their lips: and so we may safely adopt Varro's account, that
they were written upon palm-leaves; and partly in verses, partly in
symbolical hieroglyphics 10: that statement is the less suspicious, as
this material for writing ·is scarcely mentioned elsewhere among
the ancients. Pliny takes for granted that they were written on
papyrus ; because he thought all books were so before the invention
of parchment: this is of no weight against an express assertion: and
there is great plausibility in the interpretation of the scholiast who
suggests that the leaves of the Cumean Sibyl were designed by the
learned poet as an allusion to the form of the old· Roman Sibylline
books. Their nature being such, we catch a glimpse into th.e
manner of consulting them. · To have searched after a passage and
applied it would have been presumptuous: it can hardly be doubted
that they were referred to in the same way as Eastern nations refer
to the Koran and Hafiz; and as many Christians, however strictly
it has been forbidden, ask counsel of the Bible, by opening it, or
employing a verse box. · The form of the Indian palm leaves used
in writing, oblongs cut to the same size, was well suited for their

1118 H. N. lllll. 27.

19 Servius on .lEn. m. 444 1 and v1. 74. In foliis palmre interdum notis,
interdum scribebat sermonibus. They may have been leaves of the finer
sort of palm from Africa, dressed for th(' purpose: at all events in case of
need the dwarf palms which grow so abundantly in Sicily, may have been
used. The petalism of the Syracusans shows that the practice there was to
scratch marks on leaves, as at Athens and in Egypt to write on potsherds:
both were materials that cost nothing.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 385

being shuffled and drawn: thus the practice at Prreneste was to draw
a tablet. ·
The question however, whether these oracles contained presages
of coming events, ·or merely directions what was to be done for con­
ciliating or for appeasing the gods,-di~ections understood to be
addressed to the particular case which led to the inquiry,-is per­
plexing, owing to the mystery these books were involved in from
the time when Tarquinius condemned a duumvir to ~uffer the pun­
ishment of a parricide (or blabbing*. The command. however to
send for Esculapius from Epidaurust can only have been conveyed
in an oracle ~hich spoke of a pestilence, that is to say, foretold it.
During the period comprehended in the remaining books of Livy
the purpose of consulting these books was never, as it was in resorting
to a Greek oracle, to get light concerning future events ; but to learn
what worship was required by the gods, when they had manifested
their wrath by national calamities or by prodigies. All the instruc­
tion too recorded is in the same spirit ; prescribing what honour is to
be paid to the deities already recognized, or what new ones are to
be imported from abroad. The oracles in the restored collection
are out of the question here: in the earlier ages where we have
annals 1120 there is only a single example of a differe)lt kind: under the
year 566 mention is made of a prohibition by the Sibyl to cross the
Taurus with an armed force 21 • In fact however it is utterly incon­
cei~able that such a secret should have become notorious. Of the
numerous Sibylline oracles that circulated among the Greeks, many
at that 1time related to Rome; the Romans themselves regarded them
with respect as akin to their own: and moiit probably one of these
had been heard of by the legates sent by the senate to the army of
Cn. Manlius. It may notwithstanding have been ancient, suppos­
ing that it did not, speak of any particular state, and was merely
applied at that time to the Romans: possibly the prophet may have
had the Lydian kings in his eye: there had however been abundance
of generals during the two preceding centuries who mignt have fur­
nished occasion for such dissuasives. That the Roman Sibylline
oracles camEl from an Ionian source, although the neighbouring

* Dionysius 1v. G2. Valerius Maximus 1. 1. 13.

Livy x. 47.. · ' .

1120 I have not overlooked the passage in Livy m. 10: but what weight
can be attached .to ~tatements out of those times? besides an oracle never
speaks with that downright distinctness. The one which in Cicero's times
forbad an expedition to Egypt, came out of the restored set.
21 Livy xxxvm. 45.
1.-YY
38G HISTORY OF ROME.

town of Cuma likewise boasted of her prophetess, is clearly proved

by their enjoining the worship of the ldffia!l mother 1122 ; as well as
by the mi!'sion to Erythrre for the sake of restoring the books after
their destruction. '
Had the early Romans been as ignorant of the Greek language
as is usually supposed, their consulting Greek oracles would have
been next to impossible; and yet nobody has ever questioned that
those of the Sibyl were written in Greek. Nor is this merely to
be inferred from passages that unequivocally imply it: the state­
ment that two Greek interpreters were sent for in order to be quite
sure of the meaning 23, amounts to an express testimony. Besides
had not the oracles been composed in Greek hexameters, it would
never have been believed that they might be replaced by those
which were to be found in the Greek cities. But the Romans
were far from being thus unacquainted with Greek: the Greek
books dug up along with those on the pontifical law in the pretended
grave of Numa must at all events have been buried there in very
early times: in the fifth century the Roman envoy at Tarentum
spoke Greek, though but imperfectly: and were the fact otherwise,
how would several eminent Romans have been able to write Greek
all at once in the age· of Hannibal, before the period when Greek
literature was introduced? The Greek origin of the oracles is
likewise plain from what they enjoin. They invariably ordained
the worship of Grecian deities; and hereby they must have exerted
a very great influence on the religion of the Romans, in suppress­
ing what it had derived from the Sabines and Etruscans: to sacri­
fice according to Greek rites was the same thing as sacrificing by
the command of the Sibylline oracles; and every keeper of these
books was as such a priest of Apollo.
It is true, if those books ef fate, by order of which more than
once in seasons of perilous warfare two Greeks arid two Gauls, a
man and woman of each people, were buried alive, were the Sibyl­
line books, as Plutarch conceivesll4, then what went by that name
among the Romans can never have come from a Greek source.
Nor will I deny that Livy, who on a like horrible occasion ex­
pressly mentions the libri fat ales, gives that title in another place

1122 Livy xxix. 10. Varro too held the Erythrrean Sibyl to be the one
that visited Tarquinius: Servius on lEn. v1. 36.
23 Zonaras vu. 11. These are the two servi publici attached to the du­
umvirs in the account of Dionysius: IV. 62. '
24 Marcell. c. 3. '
 HISTORY OF ROME. 387

to the Sibylline books: indeed he is warranted in doing so ; for

they too were books offate. In fact, along with these Greek books,
there were preserved in the Capitol, under the guard of the same
duumvirs, the Etruscan prophecies of the nymph Bygoe, and the
homesprung ones of the Marcii 11 ~5 ; those of Albun a too or Albun ea
of Tibur 26 ; and who knows how many others of the same sort?
These were all books ef /ale; and every Etruscan city seems to
have.been possessed of such: we know of the Veientine ones, from
their having connected the destiny of Rome and Veii with the let­
ting off the .Alban lake. Now if Albunea, who was accounted
among the Sibyls, was the prophetess who advised that fate, if it
had promised the possession of Rome to Gauls or Greeks, should
be tricked as in the. treatment of the envoys from Arpi at Brundu­
sium27, Plutarch's mistake would be excusable.
In primitive times perhaps every Greek city had prophecies of
the same kind with all these, by a Sibyl, or a Bacis, or some other
soothsayer;· which were preserved in its acropolis, in the holiest
of its temples: as was the case under the Pisistratids, and afterward
under the Athe~ian republic. Her~ again we qiscover the original
correspondence between the Roman institutions and the Greek;
which was hidden from sight, when each of the two nations, the
Greeks however long before the Romans, developed the strong pe­
culiarities of their national character. Living oracles like those fo
Greece, where the deity answ~red the inquirer through the mouth
of an inspired minister, did not exist among any Italian people:
hence they sent to Delphi. Among the Apulians on mount Gar­
ganus the kindred Greek custom prevailed of earning a prophetic
vision by sleeping in the temple after offering up a sacrifice; but it
was in a Greek heroum of Calchas*. ·
The Roman oracles were not accessible to private individuals:
he who ~ought for such guidance from the heavenly' powers, went
to Prreneste to the temple of Fortuna; the goddess who dispensed
every thing that was special and providential, who diverted the
chances of an individual's life from the course prescribed and deter­
mined for him by Fate at his birth and by his own character; who
delayed or hastened his journey along it; the doom of the indivi­

1125 Servius on 1En. v1. 72. .Those of the Marcii had not been placed
there when the battle of Cannre was found iri them: Livy xxv. 12.
26 Lactantius Div. lnstit. 1. 6. 12. Sibyllam decimam Tiburtem, no­
mine Albuneam-cujus sortes senatus in Capit.olium transtulerit: where see
the commentators.
27 Justin xu. 2. * Strabo n. p. 284. b.
388 HISTORY OF ROME.

dual beiug a particular sphere of possibility ordained by Fate,

within the far more extensive range of possibility marked out by
Nature. The lots preserved at Prreneste were sticks or slips of
oak board, with ancient characters graven on them: a nobleman of
that city was said to have found them in the inside of a rock, in a
spot where he had cleft it open as he had been commanded in har­
assing dreams. They were shaken up together by a boy, and one of
them was drawn.for the person who consulted the oracle 11 ~. They
remind us of the Runic staves among the northern nations. Simi-.
lar divining-lots were to be found in several9 9, perhaps in a great
many places: those of Crere are mentioned on occasion of the pro­
digy which befell them, when they shrunk so that an oracle fell
out without the touch of a human hand*. Those of Albunea must
have been written on some material like that of the Prrenestine
ones, since they were found in the bed of a river.
The banishment of the kings was commemorated every year by
the Regifugium or the Fugalia on the 24th of February. . This is
the ground on which Dionysius states30 ·that four months of the
year were still to come: that is, he reckoned according to the aver­
age o( the Athenian calendar, the first month of which coincided
more or less with July; and assumed that the festival was a day
historically ascertained. But its connexion· with the Terminalia,
which it follows immediately, infers that the day w.as merely chosen
with a symbolical view.

1128 Cicero de Divinat. 11. 41. 29 The same.

* Livy xx1. 62. xxu. 1. 30 v. 1.
COMMENTARY ON THE STORY OF THE

LAST TARQU~NIUS.

I HAVE related the tale of the last king's glory and of his fall no
less nakedly than it must havi:; stood in those bald Annals, the
scantiness of which made Cicero think it his duty, and induced
.Livy,' to throw a rich dress over the story of Rome. That which
is .harmonious in a national and poetical historian, would be out of
tune in a work ~ritten more than eighteen hundred years later by
a foreigner and a critic.· His task is to restore the ancient tradi­
tion, to fill it up by reuniting such scattered features as still rema~,
but have been left out in that clas~ical narrative which has become
the current one, and to free it from the refinements with which
learning has disfigured it: that distinct and lively view, which his
representation also sho~ld aim to give, should be nothing more than
the clear and vivid perception of the outlines of the old lost poem.
Had a perfectly simple narrative by Fabius or Cato been preserved,
I would merely have translated it, have annexed the remnants of
other accounts, and then added a commentary, such as I now have
to write on my own text.
Certain as it is that Rome possessed Sibylline books, and yet
none can tell who wrote them, or say more than that the Sibyl is
a poetical creation; it is no less indubitable that Tarquinius was a
tyrant, and the last king of Rome: and no criticism is able to pierce
further, or to sev~r what is historical from the poem: all it can do
is to show what is the state of the case.
It is true, the most glaring among the chronological impossibili­
ties vanish in some measure, when we look at this story indepen­
dently of the dates' fixed by the pontiffs for Priscus and Servius.
If however it be then no longer inconceivable that Brutus should
have been a grandson of the former, still all else that is told of him
continues nevertheless to be a string of absurdities. · That the se­
390 HISTORY OF ROME.
cond Tarquinius should have . reigned for more than the five and
twenty years assigned to him,· can neither be assumed by those
who maintain that this narrative is substantially historical; nor will
a candid inq~irer deem it credible. But how then is it to be re­
conciled, that Brutus should be a child at the beginning of the
reign, and at the end of it the father of young men who join in a
conspiracy with the exiles ? When Dionysius states that they
were scarce grown out of boyhood, he. introduces a fictjon of his
own, but to no. purpose. Besides how could a person who was
thought to be a natural, be the king's lieutenant, with the obliga­
tion of performing priestly ceremonies, and the power of convoking
the citizens? and can we suppose that while he was invested with
such an office, he had not even the management of his own for­
tune?
In contradiction to the two historians, who represent the subju­
gation of Latium as effected by persuasion, Cicero says that it was
subdued by armsti31, Nor is the discrepancy less, where the Vei­
entines are the only Etruscan people nam~d by him as having en­
deavoured to restore the banished family by military forces•: so
that the introduction of the Tarq1.linians into th~ tale of this war, is
a forgery; which was devised, because of course there could be no
place where the exiles would rather have sought for aid, or more
readily have found it, than in their pretended home.
Their migration to Crere, totally unconnecteq as it is with the
subsequent Etruscan wars, is derived from the pontifical law books ;
where it was brought forward as the origin of the right conferred
by the community of franchise to go and settle there as a citizen.
The story of Sextus and the people of Gabii is patched up from
two well-known ones in Herodotus'~, without any novel invention.
Besides it is quite impossible that Gabii should have fallen into the
hands of the Roman king by treachery: had such been the case, no
one-I will not say no tyrant, but no sovereign in antiquity-would
have granted the Roman franchise to the Gabines, and have spared
them all chastisement by the scourge of war; aa Tarquinius is said
to have done by Dionysius himself8 3 • In fact the record of this
favour aceorded to them was contained in , the. treaty with Gabii,
which in his days was still to be read in the temple of Dius Fidius:
it was painted on a shield cased with the skin of the bull slain at
the ratification of the league 84 • The very existence of a treaty,
. 1131 De Re p. n. 54. Omne Latium hello devicit.
32 Tusc. Qureet. m. 12 (27). See note 1202.
* m. 154. v. !>2. 33 1v. 58.~ 34 Dionysius 1v. 58.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 391

though reconcilable with the case of a surrender, puts the forcible

occupation out of the question.
The spoils with the produce of which Tarquinius undertook the
building of the Capitol, the tithe of what was taken at Pometia,
were estimated by Fabius at forty talents 1185• Others, Piso for in­
stance, have stated the whole, of which that sum was the tithe,­
four hundred talents, or forty thousand pounds of silver-to have
been only the tenth part; so that the remaining nine must have
been given Up to the flOldiers, every one of them receiving five
pounds of silver, or five thousand ases. Nay, once on the wing they
do not stop here; these 4000 talents, near a million sterling, were
nothing more than the gold and silver found in Pometia: all the rest
of the property was abandoned to plunder•B, It is worth remarking
that the very author who banished all marvels out of his history,
took no offence at this enormous absurdity. But even the number
given by Fabius, out of which this fiction was spun, betrays its
fictitious origin: for, assuming that the booty, after the principle of
the ancient confederacies, was divided between the Romans, Latins,
and Hernicans, the tithe on the whole, if the Roman share was forty
talents, amounted to thrice as much, that is, to twelve times ten
talents: where accordingly we find the very ~ame numbers on
which these meagre fictions are perpetually ringing the changes 8 7.
Nay, Pometia cannot possibly have been destroyed under Tar­
113.) It is owing to one of the many corruptions in our received editions,
that we now find quadringenta instead of quadraginta in Livy 1. 53, 55, against
the manuscripts. Though, when he wrote, it may no longer have been gene­
rally known, that the Italian talent weighed a hundred pounds, so that 400
talents were equal to 40,(JOO pounds; still he could never have perceived such
an enormous difference between those two sums as his expressions imply.
Pometinre manubire vix in fundamenta suppeditavere. Eo magis Fabio­
crediderim-quam Pisoni, qui XL millia pondo argenti seposita in earn rem
scribit: summam pecuniw neque ex unius tum urbis prreda sperandam, et
nullius, ne horum quidem magnificentire operum, fundamenta non exsupera­
turam. Livy cannot have been thinking of ilmaller talents than the Attic;
and between these and the Italian the difference was only that between
~,400,000 and 4,000,000 drachms. .
36 Dionysius 1v. 50, compared with Livy 1. 55. This on a calculation
gives us an army of 72,000 men; and the share of every soldier, merely in hard
cash, is equivalent to 50 beeves. See p. 352.
37 With such barrenness of invention did those annalists, to whom Dio­
nysius looked for more copious details, go to work, perpetually repeating
themselves, and transferring incidents from one story to another, that the
spoils won from the Latins, not in alliance with them, at the battle of Regil­
lus, out of which spoils gamra were celebrated, were set down at 40 talents.
Dionpius n. 17.
 392 HISTORY OF ROME.

quinius; for a few years after. in the first age of the consulate, it is
besieged and taken*: and its greatness no doubt is entirely fabulous •.
It may be true that the Pomptine marshes derive their name from
P~metia, and that a city so called once stood on the hills at the
edge of them: it certainly did not stand within them,-where it
has only been placed, because no trace of it was to be found, and
it might there have been swallowed up in the dreary swamp-for
the air must always have been pestilential. If this morass was ever 1
cultivated more widely than at present, it can only have been as.
the result of successful drainage ; and after all the extent can never
have been considerable: for it is not a piece of land that has been
inundated; the correct view is, that there was once an arm of the
sea here stretching in behind sand-hills, and that .it has gradually
been converted into a s;wamp: during which process however many
thousand years more have past away, than was supposed by those
who imagined that this was the state of things in the tinics of the
Odyssee. I shall hereafter. give my reasons for conjecturing that
there was no Suessa called Pometia, and that.the only town of that
name was Suessa Auruncat. . ·
Thus in the story of this king again both the outline and· de­
tails vanish before us when we put them to the test. Even his
abolishing the institution of Servius cannot be admitted without
limitation: for the array of the army in maniples implies the ex­
istence of centuries and· a census; and so do the comitia held im­
mediately after his fall.
As to the particular acts of tyranny told of Tarquinius, they are
the more suspicious, because, when a man is fallen, vulgar party
spirit esteems it allowable, and sometimes even a point of duty, to
indulge in the utmost exaggeration of his guilt, nay often in calum­
nious inventions. There is the air of such an invention in the
story that he introduced human sacrifices 1 ' 38 : and, as even slander
must have a national character, .one Asiatic writer says, that he in­
vented instruments of torture 39 ; another, that he castrated boys and
de floured brides 40 •
That Brutus procured the banishment of the Tarquins in his ca­
pacity of tribune of the Celeres, was demonstrated by the lex tri­

* Livy u. 17. . t See Vol. 11, note 186.

1138 Macrobius Saturn. I. 7.
39 Eusebius Chron. N. 1469. 'Ete'iipt thl1'µ.<L, f'.<Lll''l"l)l<Lf, ~u1'<L 1 1ipvr<1.r,
<f>UAILX.l'LC 1 x.Ao10U,, 7r£Joc,, ci.Arlfiu,, i;op[et,, µ~'Tl'LJ..Arl. 1 xctl si'Tl ~"'>..Ao x.ctx.61.
So also Isidor. Origin. I. v. c. 27.
40 Theophilus ad Autolic. m. 2G.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 393
bunicia1141 • From this source came the information that he held
that office : the lay which spake of his feigned idiocy, cannot have
known any thing about it, and was incompatible with it: the an­
nalists combined the two stories. That poetical· tale was perhaps
oceasioned by hi~ surname; which yet may have had a very dif­
ferent meaning from the one there affixed to it. I. have before ob­
served that Brutus in Oscan meant a run-away slave 49 : now it is
easy enough to understand, that the partisans of the Tarquins may
have applied such a term to him, and that on the other hand he and
the Romans might not be sorry to let the nickname pass into
vogue.
The coming of Sp. Lucretius with P. Valerius, of Collatinus
with Brutus, to the house that had been desecrated, and their joining
in vowing the banishment of the tyrants, has quite the look of a
historical fact : and yet this " oath of the four Romans"* is only
symbolical of the union betwe.en the three patrician tribes and the
plebs : although it is by no means my intention to deny that these
very four men may have represented their orders, each the one he
belonged to, or that perhaps until the consulship was established
they governed the republic. Valerius stood for the Sabines. That
Lucretius belonged to the Ramnes would be clear even from the
legal tradition that the lictors went from Valerius to him owing to
his superior rank43 , But it follows still more decidedly from his

1141 Pomponius I. 2. D. de origine juris. See note 11G4.

42 See a.bove pp. 48. 74.

* It reminds us of the oa.th of the three Swiss on the Riitli.

43 We must not Jet ourselves be misled by Cicero's saying of them (de
Rep. n. 31), suos ad eum quod erat 'TfW,jor natu lictores transire jussit (Vale­
rius). The story refers to the precedence of the consul 'TfW,jor, with regard to
the meaning of which phrase even L. Cresar felt uncertain: see Festus v.
majorem consulem. The epithets of the patres, majores and minores, were
perpetually, though in a. variety of ways, perplexing the Romans of a la.ter
age, whose errors were repeated by Dionysius a.nd Livy. The Ramnes were
just as much majores in comparison with the Tities, as both of them were in
comparison with the third tribe: Dionysius II. 47. (where instead of v•t»Tipour
oilr '"iA•O"<t.r ""-"P'"iovr we ought to write our rtt»T. ''" 'll'rt.Tp.), and 57. •o 1
µh '" ""'' J.px,r1.l1»v ~OV'AtVTt.ov ~·ono-01 J' ei< TQ>V UO''t'tpov t71't10"rt.X,Bin1., (the
Tities),. our U1»-rtpovr e1'rt.Aovv •. Moreover I suspect that the Roman youths are
wronged when the conspiracy of the Vitellii a.nd Aquillii. is a.scribed to the
facility with which their age may be seduced. The eponym of the former
was no other than Ita.lus himself (see a.hove p. 11); a.nd in the house of the
Aquillii we find the surname Tuscus : hence they were both Tyrrhenians,
and so probably Luceres : a.nd the minores, whose irritation against the Tar·
quins was only transitory, and among whom their ambassadors would natu­
rally look for conspirators, seem to have been mistaken for jut1enes. .
1.-zz
394 HISTORY OF ROME.
office as governor of the city, which was attached to the dignity of
the first senator, that is, of the first among the ten first of the Ram­
nes1144: hence Lucretius was interrex; . Collatinus, as a Tarquin,
was one of the Luceres• 5 ; and Ilrutus a plebeian 40 •
The story of Lucretia's misfortune and of the consequent expul­
sion of the Tarquins is inseparably connected with the camp before
Ardea. Now since we find the Homans in the treaty of the first
consuls with Carthage stipulating as protectors for the people of
Ardea as for a subject Latin city 4 7, the statement that at the moment
of the revolution a fifteen-year<" truce was concluded with them,
cannot be maintained: nor can the war itself be saved from falling
along with it; except by such arbitrary proceedings, as the very
persons who assert the historical character of these legends, scruple
not to allow themselves; namely, by assuming that the truce in­
deed is a misrepresentation, but that Home may have reduced Ardea
to subjection in the interval.
Now as in this narrative we find marks of invention and altera­
tion throughout, I will not leave the perplexing part of what· is
related of Collatinus standing in its enigmatical form, but will hazard
an explanation of it. It is revolting beyond belief, that the qeath of
Lucretia should not, at least as a pledge, have redeemed her hus­
band, and her chil<lren, if she left any, from banishment: and the
commonplaces about the unjust jealousy of republics, which were
used to get ov'er this difficulty some nineteen hundred years ago*,
1144 This I shall show in the next volume in the section on that office.
45 See above p. 288:
46 On this point see the next section. The forms of the constitution
are so completely lost sight of in the interest of the poetical story, that not a.
word is said about the senate at the revolution: yet it was absolutely imposs·
ible for the curies to pass any decree without a previous resolution of the
senate ; and the mention of Sp. Lucretius, as holding the double office (see
Vol. n. note 236), shows manifestly that in the law books all the particulars
were fully reported. As first senator he was prefect of the city, and brought
forward the measure before the senate ; not before the curies; that was the
business of the tribune of the Celeres: as interrei he merely presided in
putting to the vote the election of the candidates proposed by the senate.
Even on this point however a. trace of the correct account may be discovered,
strangely enough, in Dionysius, where Brutus tells the citizens they had to
hear and to decide on the measures decreed by the senate: ;,.,, 'T"- Jo;<1.n<t 'T'f
O"uV£Jpi'f ,<u96n1c iir1xupwo-wre 'To J'ox9iv: IV. 84. These measures are no other
than those which according to his account were agreed upon by the four men
in the house of Collatinus.
47 K<tpx~Jouoi µ~ dJ'1ui'Two-<i.v J>iµov 'ApJi<t'Twv-µ~J'' «'A'A•r µNJ'ir11,
ArJ.'Tiv.. v 0.-01 tiv riirn1t.ooi.' Polybius 111. 2'2.
* Cicero de Ollie. lu. 10. de Re p. 11. 30~ 31. Livy 11. 2.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 3!J5

would nowise lessen the people's guilt. But what if the marriage.
of Collatinus with the daughter ofTricipitinus was merely a fiction,
to account for, or to excuse the appointing a Tarquinius to the con­
sulate?
At Athens the first step was to witlnlraw the splendour of kingly
sovereignty along with its title from the Codrids: next their dimin­
ished power was limited to a term of ten yc~us ; before the archon­
ship was made annual and thrown open to other houses; then to
the rich among the eupatrid~; and finally to every full citizen, being
now no longer any thing but a brilliant phantom. In like manner
the supreme power, or some memorial of it, descended in other
Greek :;tates from the king upon prytancs of the house he had be­
longed to. It might seem as if in an elective monarchy, like Rome,
there would be no overruling necessity for so gradual a ti:ansition:
and yet such a necessity would be felt, ·if we suppose that the
power of the Tarquins was in fact already looked upon as heredi­
tary, and that the lesser houses by their means had acquired such
a preponderance as· may have been the chief reason which induced
the major houses to unite with the commonalty. In such a case it
is even extremely probable that a conciliatory compromise would
be made with the Tarquinian house,· allowing that one of them
elected by the people should partake in the supreme power; more
especially iri a state where the advance of the constitution was·
more gradual than in any other. This is the more credible, as a
like privilege seems to have been afterward granted to the Valerii
and the Fabii. In this way Collatinus may have obtained the con­
sulship: but the change going on in the state would not halt long
at this first step : the Tarquinii furnished grounds for suspicion\'
and the whole house was banished 1148 : a record which is the more
instructive, as it represents them under an entirely different aspect.
from that of a single family, the grandchildren aad great-grandchil­
dren of Darnaratus. ·

1148 Cicero de Re p. n. 23. Civitas exulem et regem ipsum, et liberos

ejus, et gcnJ;cm Tarquiniorum esse jussit.-31. Nostri majores Collatinum
innocentem suspicione cognationis expulerunt, ct rdiquos Tarquinios offen­
sione nominis : which passage also draws a very clear hne of distinction be­
tween the kinsmen and those members of the house who were not connected
by blood. Livy n. 2. Ut omnes Tarquinite gcntis exules essent. He sepa­
rates this from the decrc~, exules esse L. Tarquinium cum coujuge ac liberis.
1. 59. Varro Antiqilit. xx. p. 209, in Nonius m. v. Reditus: Om:ncs Tarqui­
nios ejeeerunt, ne quam reditionis per gcntilitatcm spem haberent: that the
royal family might not cherish any hope of being restored hy the other inem­
bers of their gens.
THE BEGINNING OF THE REPUBLIC, AND

THE TREATY WITH CARTHAGE.

THE Tarquinii, frQm what has been said, may have rejoiced,
even more so •than any other citizens, at a change, by which the
power, until then enjoyed by a single individual, was placed annu­
ally within the reach of every noble member of their house, and
was secured to them, without being stripped of any thing but its
priestly dignity. For the kingly power was transferred, with no
abridgement but this, to the annual magistrates, who in those times
still retained the name of prretors. Hence that accurate writer,
Dion Cassiu.s, deviating from all others, does not use the name of
-consuls until after the decemvirate; when, as he conceived, the
title was changed1149• I shall allow myself however to follow
Livy and Dionysius in giving this glorious name .to the immediate
followers of the kings. For which reason l will here iniroduce the
remark, that this title is neither to be derived from consulting these­
nate, nor from giving counsel50 : for, especially at the beginning of the

1149 Zonaras vu. 19. Livy too at the same period of his history (m. 55)
mentions that prretOT .had been the earlier name. Zonaras is so punctual a
copier that up to this time he always uses 0"1p<1.1wror.
50 The former explanation was preferred by Varro: the latter by Dio­
nysius (1v. 76); and waa given by L. Attius (Varro de L. L. iv. 14. p. 24.) in
his Brutus. This play was a prmtextata, the noblest among the three kinds of
the Roman national drama; all which assuredly, and not merely the Atellana,
might be represented by well-born Romans without risking their franchise.
The prretextata merely bore resemblance to a tragedy: it represented the
deeds of Roman kings and gennals (Diomede& m. p. 487~ Putsch.); and
hence it is evident, that at least it wanted the unity of time of the Greek tra­
gedy; that it was a histOTy, like Shakspeare's. I have referred above (p. 376)
to a dialogue between the king and his dream interpreters in the Brutus,
which must have taken place before Ardea: the establishment of the new
government, which must have been the occasion of the speech, qui recte con­
sulat consul siet, occurred at Rome: 80 that the !lnity of place was just as lit­
 HISTORY OF ROME. 397

republic, commanding was far more than either the one or the other
the distinguishing attribute of the consulate. Without doubt the
name means nothing more than simply collegues: the syllable sul
is found in prresul and exsul, where h signifies one who is: thus
consules is tantamount to consentes, the name given to Jupiter's
council of gods.
It assuredly was merely from representations of the legitimate
procedure in consular elections dressed up in a historical form, that
the historians took their positive statement as• to the first consuls
being elected by the centuries 1151 • This certainly is not historical
evidence : yet although the election afterward rested with the cu­
ries, we can discover how it was usurped ; and it is not conceiva­
ble that at the very first, when the plebs was treated with indul­
gence, the laws of Servius should have been violated. Only by a
union with the commonalty could the older tribes drive the third
back within bounds ; and hence they allowed those laws to be exe­
cuted so completely that the plebeian L. Brutus was chosen one of
the first consuls.
For I confidently regard Brutus as belonging to the plebs, which
he represented among the four men. The Junian house looked
upon him with pride as the founder of its nobility 59 : and that they,
especially the Bruti, were plebeians after the time of the Licinian
law, is unquestionable: it is proved by their being tribunes of the
people down to the end of the republic58 ; and in the fifth century

tle observed. T/ie Destruction of Jrfiletus by Phrynichus and the Persians of

lEschy lus were plays that drew forth all the manly feelings of bleeding or ex­
ulting hearts, and not tragedies : for these the Greeks, before the Alexandrian
age, took their plots solely out of mythical story. It was essential that their
contents should be known beforehand; whereas the stories of Hamlet and
Macbeth were .unknown to the spectators: at present parts of them might be
moulded into trageJies like the Greek; that is, if a Sophocles were to.rise up.
1151 Comitiis centuriatis, says Livy: '"•"'<t. ~•x•u' in the field of Mars,
Dionysius.
52 Cicero Brut. 14. (53.) Philip. 1. 6. (13). It can only have been in
consequenee of their deducing their race like the Sergii and Cluentii from
one of' the companions of 1Eneas, that Dionysius (iv. 68) attributed that de­
scent to the founder of the republic. When the eponyms of the houses were
once supposed to have been their progenitors, such a genealogy was at all
events just as well suited to a plebeian house, that came from some ,Alban or
Latin town, as to one of the Ramnes. .
53 Dionysius, v. 18, u,.es this very argument to show that the later Ju­
nii Bruti were totally unconnected with the founder of the commonwealth.
He may have been sincere in this belief, and so may Dion, XLIV. 12: but the
former cannot possibly be so in the odious picture; which, when relating the
398 IIISTORY OF RO.ME.

more than one Junius Brutus appears in the consular Fasti as the
plebeian colleague. Now it is true that in many cases plebeian
families were in later ages the. only surviving descendants of patri­
cian houses; and it is possible, although an instance in point will
hardly be found, that such a: family may have retained the peculiar
surname of the patricians to.. whom they were allied: but is it not
e~ceedingly strange, when we keep in mind the distinction between
a house and a family, that before the Licinian law not a single Ju­
nius occurs in the Fasti? even admitting that the immediate pos­
terity of Brutus were extinct.. The L. Junius Brutus too, who is
mentioned by Dionysius sixteen years after the. first consulate as
one of the two first tribunes of the people, afterward as mdile, and
of whom he has a great deal to tell us 1154, but of whom Livy knows
nothing, was probably not a totally fictitious person, but one trans­
ferred by some plebeian annalist to that age from one somewhat
later, for the sake of ascribing the establishment of the freedom of
the plebeians to a kinsman of the founde~. of the commonwealth.
I have already remarked that, unless the consulate was shared be­
tween the two orders, all the liberties of the plebeians were left
without a safeguard: and as the Licinian ·agrarian law in fact only
revived that of Cassius, which ought to havP. been in forf!e during
the foregoing hundred and twenty y,ears, and which it3elf had only
given effect to an ordinance of Servius; in the same way the I,.ici­
nian law on the consulate seems only to have given a tardy effect
to a very ancient principle of the constitution. The legend indeed
calls L. Brutus the son of Tarquinia; but this no way tells against
his being a plebeian; for it belongs to the fable of his assumed
idiocy: and even if we adopt that account, yet, marriages of dis­
paragement were never forbidden, and were even frequent. Though
in fine it seems difficult, as I admit, to reconcile his being tribune
of the Celeres with his being a plebeian, yet the usurper might as­
sume the disposal of a place which legally ought to have been con-

secession of the commonalty, he tries to give of the plebeian orator, L. Brutus,

(supposing him to be the ancestor of M. Brutus),·as cif a mischievous incen­
diary; although all the demands ascribed to him are perfectly rca;;onable and
judicious. The opinions professed after the.battle of. Philippi are worth still
less than those, slight as their grounds may also be, which were held in the
time of Cicero. If Posidonius fancied he discerned a likeness to the features
of the ancient statue (Plutarch Brut. i.), this only proves that he looked with
eyes offondnc5s. . ,
1154 Throughout the history of the secession in the sixth book, and in the
seventh in the account of the law by which tlic tribunes secured themselves
from interruption when addressing the people.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 399
ferred by election: this was done by the Greek tyrantS whenever
they pleased. It is clear that in such a state of things the rights of
the orders would not be regarded: Tarquinius having availed him­
self of the jealousy of the patricians would now have to watch them:
Brutus too may have deceived the tyrant by pretended devotedness,
in order to destroy him 11ss. Moreover it is to the point to remark
that the office of the rnagister equitum was universally regarded as
a continuation of that tribunate, and yet a plebeian could hold it at
the time when the consulship was still closed against his fellows*
As soon as the patrician tribes were united among themselves, the
enjoyment of this right might easily be withJrawn from the com·
monalty, by a little boldness, anJ the crafty pretence of giving them
a compensation by other freer privileges.
The elective kings of Rome enjoyed the same honours as the
hereditary kings sprung from heroic houses: but the custom for a
whole people to mourn for such on their decease was mot peculiar
to Lacedemon; and in this way no doubt those of Rome too were
mourned for. I conceive that the testimonies of sorrow which the
matrons were said in the ceremonial books to have given for the
death of Brutus and VaJcrius, must have been acts of homage which,
so long as the consul was held to have, succeeded to the full rights
and privileges of the king, were paiu to every one who died during
his year of office.
But however near the majesty of. the consuls may have ap­
proached to that of the kings, the patrician class at least was far
better secured against a consul abusing his power: first by the inter­
position of his colleague, and next by the annual duration of his au­
thority. To bring a complaint against the kings was impossible,
as it continued to be against every one while in office: a consul, if
not re-elected, sank to the level. of a private citizen; and then the
qumstors might impeach him.
These public accusers, and not the keepers of the public purse,
must have been the qumstors spoken of in the curiate law by which
Brutus had it enacted that their oillce should continue on the same
footing as under the kings: it assuredly was only by inference that
Tacitus, who seems to ha~e k1~ow1~ this law merely at second hand,

1155 I will not lay any stress on the passage where Dionysius expressly
says (iv. 71) that the king bestowed the office on Brutus with a view of un­
derming its authority: although this doubtless was also the case if we sup­
pose that an alien to the order was invested with it. ·
* See note 1259. l'ompimius Dig. Lib. 1. Tit. n. I. Dictatoribus Ma.­
gistri Equitum injungebantur :· sic quomodo Regibus Tribuni Ce!erum.
400 HISTORY OF ROME.
and who found a statement of the first time that the centuries ap·
pointed to this place, not perceiving that by the decemviral code the
election was transferred to them from the curies, concluded that the
qurestors had previously been named by the consuls, and before by.
the kings. That they were chosen by the people, that is, by the
curies, under the monarchy, was expressly stated by Junius Grac­
chanus1156. It is immaterial here that Tacitus and Ulpian both con­
found the qwestores classici with the quteslores parricidii: which
same mistake must lie at the bottom of Plutarch's account; although
he explicitly states that the establishment of a public treasury, and
the right of electing two treasurers conferred on the people, were
among the enlargements of liberty for which the republic had to
thank the consul Publicola57. He appears' to have heard some
report of the same. law .of the curies, differently modified, and re­
ferred to Publicola instead of Bru,tus.
There is the same fluctuation between Brutus and Publicola in
the account of the filling up the number of the senate: Livy ascribes
it to the former; Festus and Plutarch to the latter; Dionysius, com­
bining the two accounts, to both. Tacitus, who tells us that Brutus
rait'ed the minor houses to the patriciate58 , i_s on the side of Livy:
for he, like Dionysius, is misled by the notion that the patricians
were noble families, the posterity of such individual sen,ators as
were appointed at the foundation of the state, or on some later occa­
sion with regard to which opinions differed. In this way he over­
looks the change made by Tarquinius Priscus; from fixing his eye
on the other great augmentation, when, after the establishment of
the consulate, plebeian knights were admitted into the senate; when
therefore it first began to be composed of patres and conscripti 59,
patricians and such as were called up by the consul. T.he account
placing the latter at 164 must certainly be a fabrication of Valerius
Antias 60 : these totally arbitraty numbers were a trick by which he

1156 ·Tacitus Annal. xi. 22. Ulpian Dig. 1. 13. Quos (reges) non sua
voce se'd populi suffragio crearent. Compare Lydus de Magistr. 1. 24. .
57 Publicol. c. 12. ""-f·"'ior .<7riJ'ei~._,,."-~[«r J'I '<If' J'n~'f No ""'' vlctv
u •.,.., 0.7roJ1l~ru.. Plutarch drew much of his early Roman history from Vale­
rius Antias; and we can easily conceive that th.is writer, vain of the house to
which he in some measure belonged, would 8fcribe all he could to Publicola.
The word 1io1 seems to be taken from the usage of later times: in this place
w~ can hardly suspect that there was any corusion between the 1101 and the
~~ . ,
58 Annal. xr. 25. l
59 Livy u. I. Festus v. Qui patres, qui conscripti.
60 Festus as before .. Plutarch Publicol. c. 11.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 401

tried to give his fictions a delusive resemblance to genuine ac­

counts.
Livy says, the tyrant had emptied the senate-house by his exe­
cutions1161: this too must be an exaggeration: and whatever quantity
of blood may have flowed, 'there was no want of patricians to make
up the complement; inasmuch as thirty years afterward the Fabii,
even if they did not amount to three hundred, were yet so nume­
rous that they formed a settlement. ' It is more likely that very many
seats were vacated by the banishment or emigration of the adherents
of the Tarquins. Ir we look at the matter historically, it was the
necessity of quieting the second estate, that· moved the patricians
to agree for the time to admitting these senators : and if the per­
sonifying principle be consistently applied, we shall assign this
equalizing measure to Brutus, considered as a plebeian. .
To frame. a conception of the state of things which led at that
time to a new system of filling up the senate, it is in the first place
requisite that we should entirely dismiss the illusions of the facti··
tious chronology, and not let O\lrselves be disturbed at the too great
length or shortness of the interval by which certain points seem to
be separated. .
Though the forming the three new equestrian centuries restored
the possibility of calling up one out of every house to the senate of
three hundred, still the houses thenceforward began anew to suffer
the lot of all exclusive bodies: they died off, and the more rapidly
1
as marriages of· disp aragement must have been frequent, in which
case the issue followed the baser blood 62 ; and thus the number of
the senate would again fall off further and further from the full com­
plement. For this there was a remedy, in case the deputies were
summoned and the vacancies fiHed up no longer by.houses; but by
curies: and this step 011 tbe road from the point where a summons.
was claimed as a right, toward a perfectly free choice, was a great
advance made by the eiective power : it was brought about by that
Ovinian tribunician law, of which we read in Festus 63• Judging

1161 1. 49. u. 1. Cwdibus ~egis in this passage jg the old spelling for regiis,
which has been left in the text from heedlessness.
62 It may be questioned however whether the son ofa plebeian woman
so married was always admitted into the commonalty; and we may suspect
that in early times this body also was much more exclusive, so that his birth
would only place him among the rerarians.' . ' ' ·
63 Ovinia tribunicia sanctum est ut censores ex omni orcline optimum
quemque curiatim in Senatum legerent. Festus v. Prreteriti Senatores: Ex
omni ordinc, which Festus copied litera.lly from Verrius, is perfectly cotrect:
J.-3 A
402 HISTORY OF ROME.

from our.knowledge of, the ancient phra~eology, such a law must

have been one passed by the curies, on being proposed to them by a.
tribune of the Celeres 1164 : Festus however did not ui1derstand it in
this way, since he foists in the censors : and as he surely cannot
have looked upon it as a decree of the plebs, he must have conceived.
that it was a law brought forward by a military tribune. We do
not indeed read any where of such a tribune as Ovinius; the name
however may have been miswcitten. Gradual as w·as the march of
change in the constitutions of antiquity, this innovation must have
preceded ~he reception of the conscripti: that is, it must either have
been enacted by a law of the curies under the kings ; or on the other
hand it is false that plebeians were admitted into the senate so early
as under the first consuls.
Supposing however that they were so, the practice cannot have
continued during those years wpen the patricians took back all they
had conceded as having been extorted from them. Even after the
Licinian law the plebeians still seem for a long time to be the smaller
number in the senate : yet they were already sitting there before
they attained to the quiet enjoyment of the right to be chosen mili­
tary tribunes 65 • Accordingly, the senate having thus become a
mixed assembly, a new system mµst have been adopted in filling
up the interregal office, which was and continued to be confined to
the patricians. The distinction between the patrician tribes could
no longer be attended to on such occasions ; there were no. longer
ten decuries of the greater hou~es: therefor13 either the patrician
s.enators formed a committee to appoint the interrexes, or they were
chosen by the curies66 , .
Among the republican institutions the origin of which wa~ car­
ried back to the first consulship, is the assignment of farms to the
plebeians in lots containing seven jugers of arable land: this mea­
sure is said to have been taken on the banishment of the kings 67,
Nothing but the royal demesnes can have been large enough for

out of the whole order (without regard to any particular gens); not, out of all
the orders. Indeed th.ere were but two of them.
1164 Exactis regibus Zege tribunicia; thiLt is, by .the lex curiata of Brutus.
Pomponius I. 2. D. de origine juris. ,
65 Livy, v.12, says of P. Licinius Calvus, whom he calls the first ple-.
beian military tribune, vir nullis ante honoribus usus, vetus tamen senator.
· · 66 See above p. 260. Livy IV. 7. 43. VI. 41. xxn. 34. The expressio~,
patricii coibant ad prodendum interregem, ma.)l be interpreted ju e~ther way.
Coire ~ontains a reference to the comitium. , .
.- 6~ Pliny xvm. 4. Columella.De .Re RUBt. I. m, 10.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 403
such a distribution; whereby all who received an allotment were
united against the restoration of the old order of things. The tra­
dition that the field of Mars either formed a part of these demesnes,
or was the property of the Tarquins, would be contradicted by a
Horatian law 1169 conferring honours on the Vestal Tarratia in reward
for her gift of it to the Roman people; if it were not inconc~ivable
that this large p1ain belonged to a single proprietor, and far more
likely that she merely gave a field in the neighbourhood 69 •
' The stories that recorded the various changes in the common­
wealth, went back to this period for the origin of the right of pri­
vate citizens to speak in the great council of the curies: some of
them tracing it up to Brutus, who conferred it on Sp. Lucretius7°;
the Valerian narratives to Publicola. There is the same disagree~
ment between these accounts as to the emancipation of Vindicius,
which however in consistency should be ascribed to Brutus: that
act was the model according to which every day the court sat a
slave might be raised to the full enjoyment of freedom by the vin~
dicta: which formality supplied the fabulous J'indiciua with his
name ; although an Italian, on becoming a slave, lost his gentile
rights with his freedom, and so could no longer bear a gentile name;
such as this would have been, but was called Lucipor or Marcipor.
After the death of Brutus, Publicola granted a general permission
for any one ta be a candidate for the consulship7 1 : this was doing
away with the rule that none should be put to the vote but such as
the senate proposed; and looks like a specious compensation to the
plebeians, giving them a freer choice, instead of the share in the
supreme office which had been withdrawn from them. Moreover
he is called the author of the custom that the consul out of the su­
perior tribe should first have the fasces carried before him ; and
finally of the practice to pronounce funeral orations upon distin·
guished citizens; himself paying that honour to Brutus.
The right understanding of the word populua dissipates the fancy
that Poplicola, the surname of Valerius, was the designation of a
demagogue like Pericles, who courted the favour of the multitude.
The assembly before which P. Valerius ordered his lictors to lower
their bundles of rods disarmed of their axes, in acknowledgement

1168 Gellius vi. 1:

69 Perhaps the law mentioned only the campus Ti~eTinu1; and sitie
Martius may have been an explanation added by Gellius.
70 Dionysius v. 11.
71 Plutarch Publicol. c. n. U1"tt.'f•'"-' u..... /-llTJtJIU ul """-P"')'rfl\1\llr
-roir (6ou1>.0t-cir•1r. '
404 HISTORY OF ROME.
that all authorit; emanated from it, was.'a concilium populi 1119 , the
great council of the patricians. Besides the consul had no business
to transact with an assembly of plebeians; still less was it a source
of his power: and the words cannot mean that of the centuries;
because this was a comitiatus, not a concilium; and did not meet
in the city, but in the field of Mars, from whence the Velia is not
in sight. ·To the curies then did he propose that law, by which
whoever should aim at usurping kingly power, or, according to other
reports, should exercise authority without being invested with it by
the people, was together with his substance devoted to the gods' 8 •
This was a declaration of outlawry, and gave the consul the right of
putting the criminal to death without being amenable·for doing so,
and every individual that of killing him. The ceremony of devoting
a guilty head was without doubt a relic from the times of human
sacrifices; for criminals, if possible, were every where s,elected for
the victims. In this manner patrons or. clien,.ts who violated their
reciprocal duties, and a husband who sold his wife after she had
placed herself in the relation of his child, were. devoted to Dis; he
who pu(a magistrate of the commonalty in peril, to Jupiter; he
who thievishly cut, or fed his. cattle on, a field of corn, to Ceres 74 •
The purpose of this law was to insure tyrannicide ; its effect, to
give impunity to murder. A better foundation for Publicola's fame
is afforded by another, whi~h is said to have been the first enacted
by the, centuries.75 • The curies in granting the imperium conferred
the power of punishing disobedience to the supreme authority,
capitally, corporally, by imprisonment, and by mulcts; even in the
meJllbers of their own body: but these had the right of appealing
r.

1172 Vocato ad concilium populo, submissis fascibus in concionem escen­

dit :-confessionem factam,populi quam consulis majestatem vimque majorem
esse. Livy II. 7. Our historian indeed was somewhat in the dark about the
meaning of the old constitutional terms, and therefore mixes up the multitudo
with his narrative: for it certainly never entered his thoughts, that this ex·
pression might be correctly applied to the patricians of the early ages. To
the annalist from whom he copied 'the' decisive words, the matter must have
been perfectly clear. .' See above note 987.
73 De aacrando cum bonis capite ejus qui regni occupandi consilia in­
isset. Livy II. 8. Herc 'the genuine formulary is discernible. Dionysius
gives an explanatory paraphrase of it: v. 19. Plutarch divides it into two
laws: Publicol. c. 11, 12. · '
74 Dionysius 11. 10.-Plutarch Romul. c. 22. See above p. 176, note
635.-Livy m. 55.-Pliny H. N. xv111. 3.
75 Cicero de Re p. rr. 31. Only it must not be forgotten that the cu­
ries at all events had to give their assent. ' ·
 HISTORY OF ROME. 405
from the sentence to their great council 11 78 • This same right of ap­
pealing to the. commona~ty, of trial by their peers, was given by the
Valerian law to the plebeians77. I say, to the. commonalty: for the
appeal lay to the plebeian tribes7 8., not to the centuries : hence the
maintenance of this right was placed immediately under the guar­
dianship of the officers who presided over the tribes.
This right of appeal did not extend beyond a mile from the
city7 9 : here began the unlimited imperium• 0 , to which the patri­
cians were no less subject than every Quirite: on the strength of
this L. Papirius had the right of exacting the blood of Q. Fabius*.
The Valerian law was not enforced by any thing more than a
declaration that whoever violated it acted wrongly: and Livy is
touched by this, as a proof of the virtue of the olden times ; yet
there is nv point on which they are less deserving of such admira­
ti<;>n. If no determinate punishment was affixed, it ·was because it
is' indispensable th~t the right of self-preservation residing _in the
supreme power should be undisputed, and not nullified by any un­
alterable limitatioJ:ls. Thus the transgressor might be condemned
by the people to a heavy punishment proportionate to his guilt;
but at the same time the extreme of violence done· to the letter of
the law might be pron'ounced innocent: only it was requisite that
to arraign the criminal there should be certain inviolable represent­
atives of the commonalty; who m1ght also interpose and give pro­
tection in the moment of need •.
These laws :i,re said to have been passed in the first year after
the banishment of the Tarquins : and in the same year the earliest
treaty between Rome and Carthage was concluded; which Poly·

117G It is of the patricians that we must understand, pro'!locationem etiam

a 9·egiJJus fuisse. Cicero de Re p. m 31. See above p. 262, note 862.
77 Livy m. 55. Cum plebem, hinc provocatione, hinc tribunicio auxilio,
satis firmassent (the consuls, L. Valerius and M. Horatius). 56. Fundata
plebis libertate. x. 9. M. Valerius consul de provocatione le gem tulit. Ter­
tio tum lata est, sempor a familia eadem.-plus paucorum opes quam libertas
plebis poterant.
78 When Volero Publilius was opposing an act of outrageous injustice,
the consuls ordered the lictors to seize him, to strip him, and to strike : but he
-ro6, -r1 J'nµ..i.px_ou, inn«>-,ho ""' 11'" tl.J'11<1i 1<pitT1P, &,,.l 7t»v J'np.o-rl1<DIV .;,,.9_
;t11v i.'iou. Dionysius 1x. 39.,
79 Neque enim provocationem esse longius ab urbe mille passuum.
Livy III. 20.. , . · ·'
80 . Here accordingly began the judicia quo; imperio contincntur, the ap­
pointment of which courts was conferred by the imperittm.. Gaius IV. 105.
* Livy vm. 32.
 406 HISTORY OF ROME.

bius translated from the original brazen tables then existing in the
Capitol in the archive of the rediles, the language being so obsolete
that in some parts even the more learned among the Romans could
only guess at the meaning 1181 • Livy perhaps made no inquiries at
all for what was authentic and historical in these ancient times:
perhaps Macer-among the annalists out of whose labours Livy
constructed his work, the one who seems to have spent the· great·
est care upon original documents-had never read the books of
Polybius ; and it is not unlikely that the tables had perished in the
flames of the Capitol, before Macer began his researches; thus
much may be considered as certain, that Livy, whose practice
throughout was only to collect the materials of his work during its
progress, did not make use of Polybius, whose value was by no
means generally recognized in those days 89 , till he reached the
Punic wars. When he wrote his second book, he probably had
never heard of this treaty. Though had it been otherwise, he tad
would not have been beyond the reach of a motive, which was
strong enough to induce many a Roman to suppress his knowledge
of that document: inasmuch as, being utterly irreconcilable with
that poetical tale which had been transformed into a history, it
divulged the secret of the early greatness of Rome and of her fall
after the .banishment of the Tarquins; a secret which her children'
in later times were foolishly anxious to kellp concealed, as if it
were an indelible blot on the honour of their ancestors.
At the time when the republic concluded this treaty, she still
possessed the whole inheritance of the monarchy. Ardea, Antium,
Aricia88, Circeii,' and Terracina, are enumerated as i::ubject cities,
and Rome stipulates for them as well as for herself. The whole
coast is here called Latin, the country L_atium: and its range is even
more extensive than from Ostia to Terracina: perhaps it stretched
0

as far as Cuma, for Camp ania did not yet exist; perhaps down to
the borders of ltalia84• Even in these regions which were still free,

1181 Ill. 22, 26.

82 This gives us a better explanation ef Livy 111 words, ltaudquaquam
spernendus a,udM" (xxx. 45), than to take them as a rhetorical figure •.. Cicero
judged differently from the fine writers of the Augustan age.
83 The manuscripts have 'Apwriv"''• which is just as likely to be a mis­
take for' Ap111.~'°''• as for A«upln""''· · Arician merchant ships, in considera­
ble numbers, are mentioned by Dionysius vu. 6. Laurentum was a small
place: rather would Laviniuni have been named: from the order followed in
the list either of them would have come before Ardea.
84 Si>e p. 68.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 407
the Carthaginians bind themselves neither to make conquests nor
to build forts. The Romans and their confederates are inhibited
from sailing into any of the harbours to the south of the l3eautiful
or Hermrean Cape, which forms the eastern boundary of the Gulf
.of Carthage: and this no doubt was not merely with the view, as
Polybius conceives, of excluding them from .the rich country on
the lesser Syrtis. It was indeed more lucrative to make Carthage
the staple. for the produce of those regions, and thus secure the
commercial profit on its exchange: but it was of still greater import­
ance by this strict exclusion to cut off the possibility of any ven­
turous Tyrrhenian mariners attempting to open an- immediate trade
with Egypt. Thi~ restriction must have been imposed in the same
way upon the Etruscans, whose commercial treaties with Carthage
were mentioned. above on the authority of Aristotle*: and so must
the following regulations. In Sicily-where in those times Car­
thage was not yet mistress of any province, but where on the north­
ern coast of the Sicanians Motye, Soloeis, and Panormus, ac­
knowledged her protecting authority; free Phenician towns, like,
Utica, Leptis, and Gades, and the remains of a multitude 'o( settle­
ments, which, before the Greeks entered th'e island, the Tyrians
ha4 possessed on every harbour and islet along the coast all around
it1185 ;-the Carthaginians secured the same privileges to the Roman
merchants as to their own. At Carthage itself, on the Libyan
coast to the west of the Hermrean Cape, and in Sardinia, the Ro­
mans might land and traffick: but the sale of their cargoes was to
be by public auction; and in that case the state was pledged to the
foreign merchant for his payment. This obligation was without
doubt reciprocal·, and was a twofold advantage to. the stranger. For
without it he would either have been in the hands of a few mono­
polizing houses ; or have run the risk, if he sold his goods for a
higher price to an fosecure purchaser, of losing them entirely:
besides public auction insured him against the exactions of the cus­
tom-house. For all duties were levied according to percentages of
the value, and not by any fixed table : their produce moreover was
farmed out, and so there was still more danger of an exorbitant
valuation. ·
Down to the latest times all Roman public documents were at­
tested by the mention of the consuls under whom they were drawn
up: in a treaty more especially such a statement cannot have been
omitted.. Thu's it might be read in the treaty with. the Latins,. that.

• Note 402, p. 97. 1185 Thucydides v1. 2.

408 HISTORY OF ROME.

it was concluded by Sp. Cassius 1186 : and as Polybius had no par­

ticular reason for introducing the names of the consuls of his own
accord, it certainly cannot be questioned that the tables contained
those of Brutus and Horatius as colleagues. This however over­
throws the whole story, that after the death of Brutus P. Valerius
remained sole consul, and at that time enacted those laws: as well
as the other, that Sp. Lucretius was the successor of Brutus. Pro­
bably there were Fasti in which the four men were designated as
the first rulers of the republic ; and thus the name of Lucretius may
have got into the list of consuls. · Or this account might be invented
in the following way: there were two statements in different Fasti
as to the consuls of the year 247: the one, which Dionysius adopts,
makes them Valerius and) Horatius; the other, Valerius and Sp.
Lucretius ; and this was followed by Livy 6 7 : both however allowed
themselves to be misled by ;n annalist, who had devised a way of
reconciling the diife;ence. What, thought he, if Lucretius was
appointed after the death cif Brutus! surely Lucretia's father had a
claim before all others to this honour. But he must have been very
old ; and if he died while still in office, Horatius might then suc­
ceed him 88. So that here again Dionysius is consistent after his
own way; having a sec'ond consulship of Horatius in 247, in which
he places the dedication of the. Capitol: Livy heedlessly adopted
the factitious statement, and yet has Lucretius as consul in the
third year of. the republic. ..
There is another difference between the Fasti of the two histo­
rians for the year 248, where Dionysius names Sp. Larcius and T.
Herminius,- of whose ·consulship l.ivy says nothing. · Both of them
were celebrated in the heroic lays, as the companions of l\'.I. Cocles
on the bridge : hence the .annalists bring them into the action in the
war with Porsenna, for the sake of peopling the void of the old
narratives with names. And since Dionysius himself says~ nothing

1186 Livy 11. 33. , .

87 The editions read P. Lucretius, (u. 15.).: but the Florentine manu­
script has the double name .Spurius Publius, which has also past into other
manuscripts belonging to the same family: Spurius is more commonly deno­
ted by S. P. than by SP. To explain this, Spurius was written over it; and
was afterward referred to the S alone. . . ,
88 Apud quosdam veteres auctores non invenio Lucretium, consulem,
says Livy himselfu. 8. Servius, on lEn. VI. 819, says that, after the i.:xpulsion
ofTarquinius, duo creati sunt consules, Brutus et Tricipitinus, pater Lucretire,
qui et Tarquinius· dicebatur: ob quod solum est urbe depulsus: et in ejus
locum subrogatus est Valerius Publicola; quo mortuo item alter est factus:
et alter similiter. '
 HISTORY OF ROME. 409
was recorded of their consulship 1189, Livy assuredly here again gives
us the old account with the. least adulteration. In truth this pair is
stuck in to fill up the gap of a year, as are several others: perhaps
also to break the series of the Valerian consulships. If they are
erased, then during the first five years of the Fasti one of the con·
suls is always a Valerius; once Marcus, the other times Publicola.
That there was some other cause for this than personal admiration~
may be inferred from the extraordinary honours which that house
inherited f1:om these primitive times. Every one of them has a story
connected with it: in this manner they stood in the books of the
ceremonial law: I will confine myself to the facts.
The Valerii had a house at the bottom of the Velia, the only one
in Rome of which the doors opened back into the street; this privi­
1ege having been accorded to them ever since the. time when Publi­
cola, or Marc.us surnamed l\laximus, received a grant of ground
there to build on9 ''. They enjoyed the 7rpot!pia, a Greek honour; of
which there was no other example among the Romans: in the cir­
cus, the Roman theatre, a conspicuous place belonged to them,
where a curule throne was erected.91 • They were allowed to bury
their dead within the walls 9 ~: and .when they too had exchanged
the older custom of interment for that of burning the corpse, although
they did not light the funeral pile on their burial ground, the bier
. was set down there, as a symbolical way of preserving the ri·ght98 •
These distinctions, if meant as rewards for services, would also
have been bestowed on others who performed much greater actions:
but neith"er Camillus nor the Decii bequeathed any such honours to
their posterity. They cease however to surprise us, if there be
good ground for the conjecture, that, among the gradual changes
of the constitution 9\ the Valerian house for a time possessed the right
that one of its m,embers should exercise the kingly power for the
Tities. As soon as we take this point of view, the measures for
tern pering the consular power begin to look as if they had a his tor~
ical foundation : nay even the story that Valerius pulled down his
house at the top of the Velia and received a spot at the foot of it,

1189 v. 36. ..
90 Dionysius v. 39. Plutarch Publicol. c. 20. Compare the Declama­
tion de Harusp. Respons. 8. [16].
91 Livy n. 31. Locus in circo ipsi posterisque ad spectaculum datus:
11ella in eo loco curulis posita. ·
92 Cicero de Legib. n. 23.
93 Plutarch Publicol. c. 23.
94 From the ~"""Mitt. through atuvrt.v'l'a[, to an aristocracy.
I.-3 B.
410 HISTORY OF ROME.

becomes then intelligible enough, if that act be regarded as a pledge

of his intention to exercise his royal authority a3 beseemed a citi­
zentt9s,
I

That the Tities are the tribe they would have represented, fol­
lows from the acknowledged Sabine descent of their house. Their.
eponym, Volesus, is mentioned as a Sabine, a companion of Ta­
tius : and the Volesus who is made the father of Publicola and Max­
im us, nay also of a l\lanius and Lucius 96 , is no other tha1' this very
person; with whom the great men of the ancie!lt tradition were
connected, in. order that their father's name might not be wanting
in the Fasti. Dion Cassius alone with his usual circumspection
merely says that Marcus Valerius belonged to the same gens as
Publicola 97 • But how could the author of .the Capitoline Fasti be
satisfied, though his readers overlooked his inconsistencies, when
following the annals in vogue he made the sons of this fabulous pro­
genitor fill curule offices from 245 to 260, and then placed his
grandson as military tribune under the year 338 ?
The fallacious assumption of a historical. semblance spreads yet
further. The poem made Marcus Valerius Maximus fall at the
lake Regillus: and the whole tale of that battle being scrupulously
retained as historical, ·a Manius was invented, and that too in late
times, to whom whatever was recorded of Marcus,-the only one
known in the days of Cicero- and Livy 98 1-in the.Annals for the
years after the battle might be transferred ; even his surname of
Maximus. The forger, supposing himself bound to re.concile the
several stories, which one and all were to be received without a
question, may have been perfectly honest, and have satisfied his
conscience about the man whom he had made. How often have
Manius and Marcus been. confournled 99 ? But honest as he may
have been, this itself is a fresh reason for rejoicing at our freedom
from his prejudices, and for not allowing ourselves to be clogged·
by his perversity and narrowmindedness.

1195 Dionysius 11. 46. Plutarch Numa c. 5. Publicol. c. 1. Another

story, how a Valesius settled at Rome, is found in Valerius Maximus n. 4. 5,
and Zosimus n. 2. 3; he too is a Sabine, and likewise the progenitor of the
Valerian house; for which reason Publicola sacrifices at his altar at Terentum.
96 See the pedigree in Drakenborch's note on Livy, m. 25. ,
97 'E,. 'T;;, 'Tov Ilo?r/\l&O.~tt o-u-r-rmitt' ')'IVOf<11"· Zonaras vu. 14. A
page before this the slovenly Byzantine, in transcribing' from Plutarch's
Publicola, calls Marcus his brother.
98 That is to say, in the manuscripts.
99 The abbreviation for Maniua in the square character is the Etruscan
M turned over to the right.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 411

How long did the V alerii ·continue to hold the consulship for
their tribe? ·when did the privilege come to an end ? these are ques­
tions on which the Fasti can give us no information. The untena­
ble character of the early :Roman history does not spring from the
nature of the constitution, so that certainty should begin with the
consular government, because there is a register of the consuls for
every year: its contents even on this side of the revolution are
poetry and fiction : the Fasti, which are supposed to substantiate it,
were framed with a view of filling up the ·given space of time.
That the war with Porsenna should be placed by one set in these­
cond, by others in the third year of the commonwealth, is far from
an immaterial difference, with regard to the greatest event of the
period: but it is of much higher impm:tance to observe that this
war probably belongs to a Considerably later time, and that in
the whole· account of it there is nothing able to stand the.test of
the slightest criticism, as histodcal truth.

. !'

. , ,t
 THE WAR WITH PORSENNA.

THE narn1tivet which since the loss of the ancient Annals has
chancer! to acquire the character of a traditional history, relates that,
after the b:ittle by the forest of Arsia, the Tarquins, to obtain more
powerful succour, repaired to the court of Lar Porsenna 1900 , king of
Clusium; and that he, when his intercession had been rejected,·
led his army against Rome in their behalf. But this cannot possi­
bly have gained universal currency. Cicero, though he was very
well acquainted with the celebrated legend of Porsenna and Scre­
volat, says, neither the Veientines nor the Latins were able to re­
place Tarquinius on the Roman throne 9 • So that he tiither held
the Veientine war in which Brutus falls, to be the same' with Por·
senna's: or he discriminated between the latter, as a war of con·
quest, and the attempts of the neighbouring states to place the
government of Rome in the hands of the man who· had thrown
himself on their protection, and who was to pay them dear for it.
And such no doubt was the older and genuine representation.
In this narrative then the Etruscans under Porsenna march singly
against Rome: and so the story runs in Livy : it is a palpable for­
gery in Dionpius to make Octavius Mamilius and the Latins take
part with him: the son-in-law of Tarquinius forsooth could not
possibly remain inactive. In the poetical aecount the Etruscan
army appears at once and with an overwhelmi11g force before the
Jariiculum ; and the Romar.s in the fort upon it are overpowered
and fly to the river. As the enemy was purs~ing them, he was
met by Horatius Cocles, to whom the duty of guarding the b~idge
had been entrusted, and by his comrades, Sp. Larcius and T. Her­

1200 The name is spelled both Porsena and Porsenna: it is a decided

blunder however in Martial.to shorten the penultimate.
1 Pro Seat. 21. (48). Paradox. 1. 2.
2 Tusc. Qumst: 111. 12. (ZT). Tarquinius cum restitui in regnum nu
Yeientium nee LatiMrUm. armis potuisset.
 HISTORY OF ROME. , 413

mmmi;. Three men saved Rome, as three had won for her the
dominion over Alba; and in this case no doubt there was one from
each tribe 1 ~ 03 • While they kept off the assailing host, the crowd
behind them by their ordel' fore down the bridge : immovably they
bore up against the thousands of the enemy. 1\1. Horatius bade his
companions also go back, and withstood the shock of the foe alone,
like Ajax, until the crash of the falling timbers and the shout of the
workmen announced that the work was accomplished. Then he
prayed to father Tiberinus, that he would receive him and his arms
into his sacred stream, and would save him; and he plunged into
the waters, and swam across to the city, amid all the arrows of the
enemy". As a mark of gratitude every inhabitant, when the famine
was raging, brought him all the provisions he could stiu't himself
of: afterward the republie raised a statue to him, and gave him as
much land as he could plough round in a day.
The statue stood in the Comitium 5 : once on a time it was
struck by lightning, and by the advice of perfidious aruspexes was
removed to another spot where the sun never shone upon it. Their
fraud however was detected: the statue was placed on the Vulcanal
above the Comitium, and the Etruscans were put to death: this
brought good fortune to the republic. In those days the boys sang
in the streets :
1 • 'Who ill aredeth shall his own areding rue:

and the saying continued from that time forth in the mouth of the
people 8 • ·
That the meaning of the expression circumarare in the grant to
Cocles should be,' that he was to have as much land as was inclosed

1203 The Horatii were one of the minor houses: iic, .,.,.; ,....,.~P'"'· Dio­
nysius v. 23. The tradition too was uncertain whether. they or \he Curiatii
fought for Alba: Livy I. 24 : a~ove p. 266. Hence it was deemed an act of
presumption toward his colleague of the higher tribe, for the consul Horatius
to dedicate the Capi,tol. ,
4 One i:annot but be. annoyed at the stupidity which thought Horatius
had purchased his glory too cheaply if he came off without a wound, and BG
made a javelin pierce him through the thigh and Jame him for life. Diony·
siua I. 24. Livy keeps clear of such wretched absurdities. It is another
thing, when Polybius, whether after different accounts, or to get rid of every
thing fabulous on so very momentous an occasion, writes that Cocles perished
in the tiver. VI. 53.
5 What Livy calls the Comitium, Dionysius calls av .,.,, ..p~-rlll'-rtf 'l''ii'
a.,..o,;, .,.4,,,.,, which should be carefully noticed with a vie'\}' tC> other topo­
gra.phical statements.
6 Gellius IV. 5. Malum consilium consultori peseimum est.
414 . HISTORY. OF ROME.
. ,
within a furrow which at sunset again reached the point it had
started from at sunrise-as Sultan Mohammed endows the hero of
the Turkish ballads whh as much ·of the plain of Macedonia as he
a
can ride round in day-would be inconceivable, if we had any
right to look here for historical tradition. For such a line would
comprehend pretty· nearly a square league: and more than' two
hundred years after, when Italy had been subdued, but fifty jugers
were bestowed on the conqueror of Pyrrhus; which he himself
reproved as an act of extravagant prodigality*. The republic had
neither means nor will to make such large grants: but the poet
might overlook both these objections. The narrow limits within
which the ~ld Roman manners and laws aimed to confine landed
property, salutary as· they were to the state, did not on that account
act the more as a check on the desires of individuals : wealth has
in all ages been deemed the pleasantest meed of virtue : and as the
poets in Epirus and on Olympus sing of the golden trappi~gs on
of
the horses of the klepts, and of the golden raiment the damsels;
so the vales likewise fabled of such splendid rewards for Cocles
and Screvola, as Ennius would never have dreamed of as attainable
by Scipio Africanus. ·
Just as little did they trouble themselves about the difficulty how
Rome could be starved by an enemy who was only encamped on
the Janiculum, even supposing him to have commanded the river.
To account for this, the annalists devised certain ptedatory expe­
ditions on the left bank; and then, to supply the dearth of action'
and do honour to their ancestors, they further invented a stratagem
of the consuls, by·~hich the Etruscans are drawn into a snare and,
suffer considerable loss~ · ' ;
For the poem it was enough that R~me was reduced to desperate
straits ·by famine. Hereupon; a young . man, Caius, undertook,
with the approbation of the senate, to kill the invading king. He
was acquainted· with the Tuscan language, and making his way up
to the prretorium, slew one of the king's attendants, instead of Por­
senna. · Being overpowered and disarmed, in scorn of the rack
which awaited him he thrust his right hand into the flame of ·the
fire on the altar: the king bade him depart in peace : and Screvola','
as from that day forth he was called, because be now had only hi'~,
! ., · i i ! ' '

* Pliny xvm. 4. Valerius Maximus IV. 3. 5. Columella 1. 3. Curius ·

Dentatus, prospero ductu parta victoria, ob eximiam 1'irtutem deferente po·
pulo prmmii nomine quinquaginta soli jugera, supra consularem triumphalem"
que fortunam putavit ease: repudiatoque publico· munere, plebeia. mensura.
(septenum jugerum) contentus est. ,,,·; .... ' ;,
 HISTORY OF ROME. 415

left hand,' warned him as a token of gratitude, if he prized his life,

to make peace; for three hundred1• 0 7 young patricians had conspired
to rid their c~untry of him; and he himself had only been chosen
' • I
by lot to be the first.
He was rewarded by the senate no less splendidly than Cocles8 :
but another tradition modestly named the Prata Mucia in the Tras­
tevere, a field, it would seem, of a few jugers, as the grant bestowed
upon him. Now in reply to the question how he came not to be
remunerated by consulships, I will myself suggest the solution, that
at Rome as elsewhere the ceremonial law required a priest to be
without blemish in any of his limbs; and, because the higher ma­
gistrates continued to exercise certain priestly functions, the same
was exacted for them 9• And if Screvola's name was C. Mucius, he
must have been a plebeian; like the family of that name which ap·
pears in the Fasti; though not until three hundred years after, and
whose plebeian character is most decided; like a P. Mucius with­
out a surname,, who w:as tribune as early as in the fourth century:
so that the consulate would have lain out of his reach, even if Por­
senna had fallen by his hand. But the claim to him set by the
Mucii is .doubtless among the most glaring instances of the family
vanity censured by Cicero and Livy. The peculiar Roman name
for persons, or, as it was afterward termed, the prrenornen, was of
old no less predominant in general use th;n christian .names are
nowadays in ·Italy: eve11 in Polybius we still find Publius and
Titus usually put for Scipio and Flamininus 10 : and as the practice
from that time forward decreases, it must have been the more pre­
valent the further we go back. Thus the hero of the old lays
would probably be lIJerely called Caius: that he was originally re­
garded as a. patrician, as Dionysius terms him-which indeed, if he
were a Mucius, could only be excusable from the ignorance of a
.foreigner,-is the more probable. on account of the three hundr~d

1207 Here again we have this number, which is for ever recurring as far
as the old poems extend.
8 · Dionysius v. 35. •
9 M. Sergius, who was excluded from offering up sacrifices by his col­
leagues, on the ground of his being a cripple (Pliny H. N. vn. 29) 1 had indeed
been prmtor ,: but the inflicting such a mortification on that hero infers that.
three centuries earlier he would not have been eligible. Dionysius too ac­
counts for Cocles not.being rewarded with the consulship by his being crip­
pled: l1oi .,.,;, ,.,.,;f"'D"" .,lie ,S:i'.D"t"'n v. 25. , :
10 Gaudent prmnomine molles Auriculre: simple times love to speak
familiarly. Under the emperors this forename wassupplanted by the eurna.me,
first neglected, then entirely forgotten.
416 HISTORY OF ROME.

young men of whom he speaks as his associates in the enterprise,

the flower of the Roman youth; that is to say, one from every
house: he himself is called noble by Livy. · The surname of the
Mucii according to Varro had a totally different sense, and signified
a~ amulet1 m: it was not peculiar to them;· Screva too was a surname
in several families: but as s_c::evus means left, the hero of the story
might also be called Screvula, long before the Mucii were of any
note.
As the price of peace the conqueror enjoined that the Veientines
should have their seven pagi restored to them•~: and the fort· on
the Janicuhun was only evacuated on the delivery of hostages.
Thus far did the foelings of a more sensitive age, wounded by the
disgrace of their ancestors, soften down the cruel hardness of the
truth. 'facitus alone pronounces the. terrible ·word undisguisedly :
the city was forced to surrender to the conqueror 13 : that is to say,
submitted to him. as her lord ; in such a way that the republic n:ade
over the sovereignty to him, as did every individual a discretionary
power over his property, freedom and life, without any restriction.
A vanquished state after this ~tood in a relation to a ruling one, like
that of an individual who had forfeited his independence by an
adoption according to the process o.f arrogation, or by having pledged
his person for debi14• He who ceased to be his own master, only
retained what he had hitherto po'ssessed as property, under the form
of a peculium: the case was the same with the state that had given
up its res publica to a lord, so that he might take every thing from
it at will; and not only the public property, but that of every indi·
vidual. This disability did not terminate until the capacity of per·
sonal rights had been re-established by a process answering to that
of emancipation. It was a partial exercise of thi's plenary power,

1211 De L. L. v1. 5. p. 99. Quod puerulis re~ turpicula. in collo suspen­

ditur,-screvo!a appel!a.ta.: thus the Florentine MS.
· 12, De agro Veientibus restituendo impetratum, says Livy; one· cannot
read such arrogant language without indignation.
13 Sedem Jovis Opt. Max. quam non Porsenna deditaurbe, neque Galli
capt.a, teroerare potuissent. Hist. m. 72. Taken strictly, the meaning of
T~itus would be, that Porsenna had been unable to violate it, and conse­
quently that he was not roaster of the Capitol: it is likely however that potu­
is3ent refers only to the Gauls.
14 In the forroulary for surrendering a city in Livy 1. 38, the king asks
the envoys: Estne populus Collatinus in sua potestate ?-Est.-Deditisne vos,
populumque Collatinum, urbem., agros, aquam, terminos, delubra, utensilia,
divina humanaque omnia, in meam populique Romani ditionem ?-Dedimus.
-At ego recipio.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 417

when a town thus reduced to dependence was amerced of a certain

portion of its territory; and this was very frequently a third: after·
ward, unless the remainder was expressly given back free, a tax on
the produce of all the cultivated land was to be paid; which the
Romans usually assessed at a tenth. I have before called the reader's
attention to the fact that a third of the plebeian districts which
Rome possessed under Servius Tullius, was lost; and I observed
that this loss must have been incurred in the war which we call
the war of Porsenna* ~ the mention of the i;even pagi in the Annals
does not prove that nothing more was taken away. But a tradition
had also been preserved that the Romans at one time paid a tenth
to the Etruscans 1015 : and this too can only be referred to the present
period: it was raised on the districts left to them, and on the pub­
lic domain.
Until the town which had surrendered its independence to another,
recovered it, no treaty with it could have place; just as an indi·
vidual could not enter ir.to any contract with. those who were sub­
ject to his paternal authority, or with his slaves and bondmen.
Pliny therefore either uses a very inappropriate expression : or the
laws imposed by Porsenna on the Romans belong to the time when
at least the form of independence, though defenceless indeed and
pull, was given back to them. This document, which from his
manner of citing it would seem to have been still in existence, shows
how low they had fallen. They were expressly prohibited from
employing iron for any other purpose than agriculturc 16 : a people
on whom a command of this kind was laid, must have been com­
pelled beforehand to deliver up all their arms 17 •

* Above p. 319, n. 976.

1215 From which Hercules delivered them; that is to say, their own
prowess. Plutarch Qurest. Rom. xvm. p. 267. c.
16 Pliny H. N. xxx1v. 39. Infoedere quod expulsis regibus populo Ro­
mano dedit Porsenna, nominatim comprelwnsum invenimus, ne ferro nisi in agri
culturam uterentur. This and the equally important passage ofTacitus (note
1213) were first noticed by Beaufort: and they are perfectly sufficient for his
purpose, which was merely .negative. The critical examination of this war is
the most successful part of that remarkable little work.
17 Arma adem.ta, obsidcsque irnperati, would be the way of telling the
11tory, ifthe historian were speaking of a town which had submitted in the
same manner to the Romans. Dionysius docs not fall far short of this con·
fession in a harangue put into the mouth of M. Valerius: J'uf'6rT9' ul ct')'•ptt.r,
x.'11 0?T>..-:i, x.d.l rrriA'J..&L Ocrttv £1£ovTo T~Pfn1ol 'lrt1.pd.rrx,e"iv i7rl 'T~ •~ttrd.i\Uo-u 'l'oU
,,.H,l~ou. v. 65. This is not indeed 1r"-ptt.l1J'on1~ 'T<t ;;,,.Att. and sounds rather
as if all was done in compliance with a milita.ry requisition : but that is the
very point where the disguise lies.
J.-3 c
418 HISTORY OF ROME.

A confession that Rome did homage to Porsenna as its sovereign

lord, is involved in the story that the senate !jent him an ivory
throne and the other badges of royalty 121 s : for in this very manner
are the Etruscan cities represented to have acknowledged L. Tar­
quinius Priscus as their prince.
What Livy says concerning the evacuating the citadel on the
Janiculum, seems connected with the restoration of independence
to the city after it had been disarmed. The twenty patrician hos­
tages, boys and damsels, refer, as is clear from their number, to· the
curies of the first two tribes ; whose precedence extended, as was
reasonable, to whatever sacrifices were to be made. 'Vith regard
to these hostages there is again a twofold story : the more celebrated
one, that Clcelia effected her escape out of Etruria at the head of
the maidens, and swam across the Tiber ; that she was sent back,
was restored to liberty by Porsenna, and allowed to deliver the
boys out of their captivity; and that she was rewarded by him
with a horse, trappings, and arms 19, and by the republic with a
statue in the Via Sacra of a damsel on horseback :-the more ob­
scure one, that Tarquinius fell upon the hostages as they were con­
ducted into the Etruscan camp; and, with the exception of Valeria
who fled back to the city, massacred them all 20 •
Porsenna meanwhile had returned to Clusium: he had sent hi§
son Aruns with a part of his army against Aricia, in those days the
principal city of Latium 2 1. The Aricines received succour both
from other cities and from Cuma : and the Cumans, led by the in­
sulted hero of the Tyrrhenian war, decided the defeat of the Etrus­
cans, whose general fell. The fugitives met with hospitable enter­
tainment at Rome, and their wounds were taken care of: many of
them were loath to leave the city again, and built the Vicus Tuscus:
Porsenna, not to be outdone in magnanimity, gave back the· hos­
tages and the seven pagi2 2.

1218 Dionysius v. 35. See above p. 274.

19 Dionysius v. 34. and the fragment from the fourth book of Dion
Cassius in Bekker's Anecd. 1. p. 133. 8. Kctl .. ~ i'' 11.op~ xctl 0"1'/l.ct-1<<tl
'/,,,.,,,.01 iloopilo-ct'l"o. These words- evidently refer to the king : in Livy these
presents also are bestowed on Clcelia by the Romans.
20 Pliny xxxxv. 13. The two stories are clumsily mixed up together by
Dionysius v. 33, and by Plutarch Publicol. c. 19. ·
21 For this reason it had the temple of Diana: the opposition to Tar­
quinius made by Turnus Herdonius contains· a reference to the pretensions
and the circumstances of this city: so does the account in Dionysius (v. 61)
of the Aricines exciting Latium to war against Rome.
22 No doubt the traditions were still richer in individual instance• of a
 HISTORY OF ROME.

The Roman annalists make the Etruscan hero display his libe­
rality at the expense of his dependents or allies; for these pagi had
been restored to Veii : nor, if this had occurred to them, would
they have been slow in devising some act of perfidy or other, by
which the Veientines should have exasperated the noble spirit of
their protector to punish them ; just as a like inducement was
contrived, to make him abandon the Tarquins. But even in the
time of the decemvirs so far were the Romans from having regained
their Etruscan territory, that the Tiber then forll!ed their boundary;
with the insignificant exception of the J aniculum and the Ager Va­
tican us.
Were the Romans incapable of feeling that chains which we
burst by our own might are an ornament? The defeat of the
Etruscans before Aricia is unquestionably historical: the victory of
the Cumans, which led Aristodemus to the sovereignty, was related
in Grecian annals : had not those of the Romans through false shame
concealed their previous humiliation, they might have told with
triumph how their ancestors had courageously seized that moment,
although deprived of arms and perilling the objects of their dearest
affections, to break the yoke of the tyrant. At such a time the
flight of the hostages might do some good, and the heroine who
led them might deserve to be rewarded.
- This insurrection must have placed sundry things that belonged
to the foreign ruler within the city, at the disposal of the emancipated
Romans; and thus no doubt gave rise to the symbolical custom at
auctions of selling the goods of king Porsenna. Livy, who found
it still in existence, felt that it did not sort well with the story about
the friendship that followed the war: only he ought likewise to
have rejected the shallow explanation of it. ·
That Porsenna was a hero in the Etruscan legends, and that
they must have placed him in very remote ages beyond the reach
of history, seems implied in the fabulous account of his monument:
a building totally inconceivable, except as the work of magic, and
which must have vanished like Aladdin's palace*. Possibly the
Roman tradition may without any ground have connected him with
that Etruscan war which cast Rome down from her height: thus

chivalrous intercourse during the war with Porsenna. The following is as·
suredly an ancient one: a truce had been concluded, and it happened that
some games were celebrated just at the same time: hereupon the Tuscan
generals came into the city, won the crown, and received it. Serviu1 on
./En. XI. 134.
* See note 405.
420 . HISTORY OF ROME.
much we. may assert, that of this war down to its end not a single
incident can pass for historical.
It is a peculiarity of the Roman annals, owing to the barren in­
vention of their authors, to repeat the same incidents on different
occasions, .and that too more than once. Thus the story of Por­
senna's war reflects the image of that with Veii in the year 277,
which after the disaster on the Cremera brought Rome to the brink
of destruction. In this again the Veientines made themselves
masters of the Janiculum; and in a more intelligible manner, after
a victory in the field: here again the city was saved by a Horatius;
the consul who arrived with his army at the critical moment by forced
marches from the land of the V olscians : the victors, encamping on
the Janiculum, sent out foraging parties across the river and wasted
the country ; until their depredations were checked by some skir­
mishes, which again took place by the temple of Hope and at the
Colline gate: yet a severe famine arose within the city. At the
same time, though all this has only been transplanted into the war
of Porsenna to fill up the vacant space, the latter is not therefore to
be regarded as a mere shadow and echo of the other, as is the case
with one of the Auruncian wars. It was that Etruscan war by
which Rome, though it lifted itself up again and regained its inde­
p~ndence, lost ten regions; and it must be placed before the yeai
259, when the tribes were raised to the number of one and twenty.
I think however it was at no great distance from that ~eriod.
I hold the returns of the census, incredible as they sound in the
times anterior to the conquests by the Gauls, to be as genuine as
the Romans considered them: and till I have justified this confi­
dence in the proper place*, they will at all events be admitted to
represent a view that was taken of the growth or decline of the Ro­
man state •. Had an annalist invented them, he would have framed
them to fit his stories: if then they are utterly irreconcilable with
the Annals, they must have been handed down from a time consi­
derably earlier, and so are important. Now Dionysius gives the
returns of the years 246;256, and 261, by the numbers 130,000,
150,700, and 110,000: in our annals~the war with Porsenna falls be­
tween the first and second date: between 256 and 261 there is
neither a pestilence nor a loss of territory; but on the contrary the
victory over the Latins. Nothing can be more incongruous : if
however we do not let ourselves be dazzled by the Annals holding
up dates to our view, we may still make an attempt to explain

" See Vol. n, note 141 1 and the following pages,

 HISTORY OF ROME. 421

this. I will suggest it at least as a hypothesis, that the former

increase was owing to the extension of the isopolite franchise:
the decrease of 40,700 on the other hand may have arisen mainly
from the separation of tribes enjoying isopolity, but also no doubt
from the loss of the regions wrested from Rome. It is true, all
the landholders in those regions assuredly <lid not cleave to the soil;
and even if they had, their number would have been far from
amounting to so many thousands. Still that of the Romans was
very much diminished by the loss; and our finding in those years
only names without any events in Livy warrants the conjecture
that there were great misfortunes to be concealed. The servitude
of Latium under Mezentius is nothing but the recollection of this
age thrown back into an earlier one: an<l perhaps Virgil's antiqua­
rian learning may have actually discovered traditions representing
the same Etruscan, whose yoke I,atium afterward cast off again,
as the taker of Agylla*: which in the time of Cyrus, when it sent
to consult the oracle of Delphi, was st~U perhaps a purely Tyrrhe­
nian city.
It is true, if the date of the Etruscan war against Cuma were
historically certain, internal reasons would forbid our placing the
expedition of Aristo<lemus to Aricia so late as the en<l of the 70th
"Olympiad: for it is incredible that the oligarchs, whose motive for
seeking his destruction was their animosity conceived <luring that
war, should have delayed doing so until twenty years after it1299 •
The feuds in the states of antiquity did not creep on thus smoulder­
ingly. But it was solely from his own calculations that Dionysius
determined this period: for the date of the Cuman war he derived
from Greek writers 24 , that of the Aricine from Romans. To
my mind chronological statements' concerning a war in which
rivers run backward, ate of just as much value as those in the fable
of the Pelopids where the sun does the same: and if any one be­
lieves that the Cuman history of this period rests on surer founda­
tions than the Roman, let him compare the story of Aristodemus
in Dionysius with that in Plutarch 85 ,
* .iEn. vm. 479. ff. See above p. 28. 1223 Dionysius vn. 5.
24 Perhaps by Timreus: but more probably by the chronicles of Naples,
where the fugitives from Cuma were taken in: and th9.t they brought legen­
dary tale~ along with them is no less certain than it is unlikely that they pre­
served any authentic documents. When Herodotus (1. 29) makes a mistake
of ten Olympiads with regard to the legislation of Solon, what credit is due to
a date of this kind? The mention of the Campanians is a sign that the source
was recent.
25 Mulier. Virtut. xxv1. p. 261. According to this version AriRtodemus
brings aid to the Romans.
 THE PERIOD DOWN TO THE DEATH . OF

TARQUINIUS.

WHEN we reach the borders of mythical story, which without a

miracle could not be immediately followed by regular annals, a
division of time by epochs is a necessary shift, which ought not
therefore to subject me to the charge of inconsistency. The opinion
we are to form on the pretended histories of the period just marked
out, is evident from comparing the two historians. Livy under 251
and 252 narrates a war against Pometia and the Auruncians, and
repeats the same afterward, under the year 259, as a war against
the Volscians 1220 : Dionysius was too careful to commit an oversight
like this, and relates it only in the latter year. On the other hand·
Livy, who on this point is the more inconsiderate of the two,
displays much greater judgment '"'ith regard to the Sabine wars;
mentioning nothing about them except two triumphs out of the Fasti;
without a syllable on the military, occurrences of the five campaigns
circumstantially recounted by Dionysius.
Nor does the latter go less into detail in describing the events of
the Latin war; of which nothing but the battle of Regillus is nar­
rated by Hvy; except under 255, where he says, as briefly as pos­
siblr., that Fidenre was besieged, Crustumeri,il taken, Prreneste
came over to the Romans. As to the celebrated battle itself he tells
us candidly, that while some, whom he followed, placed it in the
year 255, others put it off till 258 under the consulship of Postu­
mius-the date given by Dionysius: from which variation it is clear
that the oldest triumphal Fasti did not mention it. 'Without doubt
too it was only the later annalists who spoke of Postumius as the
commander; having already forgotten that the Africanus whose
renown was sung by the Calabrian bard, was the first Roman who

1226 The three hundred hostages who are put to death in u. 16, are the
same who in n. 22 are given up in 25!1.
 llISTORY OF ROME. 423

gained a surname from his conquests 1227; while they did not observe
how frequently surnames from a place of residence occur in the
Fasti of the earliest times. As the Claudii took that of Regillensis,
so did the Postumii. This battle as thrust into history stands
without the slightest result or~ connexion: the victory is complete;
and, after several years of inaction, a federal treaty sets its seal to
the perfect independence and equality of the Latins, the very point
which the battle was fought to decide.
So that here again we have merely a heroic lay; another fragment
of which has been preserved by Dionysius. Before the melancholy
contest between the two kindred nations broke out, they engaged to
keep peace for a year, that the numberless ties amongst their
citizens might be amicably dissolved. Leave was also granted to
such women of each nation as had married in the other, to return to
their friends, taking their daughters along with them. All the
Roman women28 left their J,atin husbands: all the Latin women,
except two, staid at Rome. The proud virtue of the matrons was
still blooming in full purity when these lays were composed.
The battle of the lake Regillus, as described by Livy, is not an
engagement between two armies; it is a conflict of heroes like those
/
in the Iliad. All the leaders encounter hand to hand, and by them
the victory is thrown now into one scale, now into the other; while
the ·troops fight without any effect. The dictator Postumius
wounds king Tarquinius, who at the first onset advances to meet
him•s: T • .lEbutius, the master of the horse, wounds the Latin
dictator: but he himself too is disabled, and forced to quit the field.
Mamilius, only aroused by his hurt, leads the cohort of the Roman
emigrants to the charge, and breaks the front lines of the enemy:
this glory the Roman lays could not allow to any but fellow·citizens,
under whatever banner they might be fighting. · M. Valerius, sur­
named Maximus, falls as he is checking their progress: Publius and
Marcus, the sons of Publicola, meet their death, in rescuing the
1227 Primus certe hie imperator nomine victm ab se gentis est nobilitatus:
exemplo deinde hujus, etc. Livy xxx. 45.
28 Away with the insipid refinement fl.l"po'iJ Ja"ir !ll"t:tll'<tl, in Dionysius
VI. 1.
29 Dionysius is angry with Macer and Gellius, for not calculating that
Tarquinius, even supposing him the grandson of Priscus, must have been
ninety years old. Is it purposely that he suppresses their both calling him
the son of Priscus ? so that according to the tables his age must have been 120.
He himself substitutes Titus Tarquinius for his father, to save the battle for
history.
 424 HISTORY OF ROME.

body of their uncleusa: but the dictator with his cohort avenges them
all, repulses the emigrants and puts them to flight. In vain does
· Mamilius strive to restore the day; he is slain by T. Herminius, the
comrade of Cocles: Herminius again is pierced through with a jave­
lin, while stripping the Latin general of his arms. At length the
Roman knights, fighting on foot before the standards, decided the
victory: then they mounted their horses, and routed the yielding
foe. During the battle the dictator had vowed a temple to the Dios·
curi: two gigantic youths on w bite horses were seen fighting in the
van; and from its being said, immediately after the mention of the
vow, that the dictator promised rewards to the first two who should
scale the wall of the enemy's camp, I surmise that the poem related,
nobody challenged these prizes, because the way for the legions had
been opened by the Tyndarids 31 • The pursuit was not yet over,
when the two deities appeared at Rome, covered with dust and
blood: they washed themselves and their arms in the fountain of
Juturna beside the temple of Vesta, and announced the events of the
day to the people assembled in the Comitium: on the other side of
the fountain the promised temple was built. The print of a horse's
hoof in the basalt on the field of battle remained to attest the pre·
sence of the heavenly combatants 3 ll,
This~ it must be owned, is a rich and beautiful epical story; and
yet assuredly our historians were not acquainted with its genuine
old form. This battle of giants, h, which the gods openly take part
and determine the result, closes the Lay of the Tarquins; and I am
convinced I am not mistaken in conjecturing that in the old poem
the whole generation who had been warring with one another ever
since the crime of Sextus, were swept away in this .llJort of Heroes:
he himself according to Dionysius fell here. In our accounts indeed
king Tarquinius is only wounded and escapes; but this is to make
the story· tally with the historical record of his dying at Cuma.
Mamilius is slain: Marcus Valerius Maxim us is slain, in spite of
the historical traditions that he was dictator some years after: and
Publius Valerius, who also finds his death, is assuredly not Pub·
licola's son, but Publicola himself•. Herminius too falls: so most
unquestionably does Larcius, the second companion of Cocles, and

1230 This is mentioned by Dionysius alone: that it is drawn from an an­

cient source is the more certain, since they come forward as actors in a. later
part of his history. See Glareanus and SyIburg on Dionysius n. 12.
31 · As was the case in the battle of Fabricius a.gainst the Luca.nian1.
Valerius Max. 1. 8. 6.
32 Cicero de Nat. Deor. m. 5 (11).
 HISTORY OF ROME. 425

doubtless no other than the first dictator: only he is kept in the

back ground, because a different one is put at the head of the army.
Thus the manes of Lucretia are appeased : and the men of the heroic
age depart out of the world before injustice begins to domineer, and
.gives birth to insurrection, in the state which they had delivered.
The account in the annals, which places the death of Publicola
in the year 251, is not more authentic than the poetical story: as­
suredly it had no other foundation than that his name is not met
with further on in the Fasti. The funeral orations of his family have
supplied us with the information that the matrons mourned for him
ten months, as they did for Brutus; and that he was buried at the
public expense. According to one story the cost was defrayed from
the common chest of the burghers••••; which agrees with his name
Poplicqla: according to the other a quadrant a head 34 was contri­
buted by the people, that is, by the commonalty: for this was a
plebeian mark of respect. Probably in conformity with the ancient
practice neither of the two estates was behind hand with the other,
as the fact is represented on the decease of Menenius Agrippa35,
The paying them such a last honour is no ground for supposing
that either of the two died in want.
The death of Tarquinius at Cum a is certainly historical: but the
only reason.for placing it in the year .259 was no doubt because the
ferment among the commonalty broke out in that year; and the tradi­
tion ran, that, so long as he lived, the patricians kept within bounds.
Aristodemus, whose name is infamous among those o( the earlier
Greek tyrants for his atrocities, became the heir of his illustrious
client; and some years after detained the property of the republic,
in lieu of his claims to that of the Tarquins. Of the sons and grand­
sons of th:e Roman exiles, some may perhaps have been among the
followers of Appius Ilerdonius when he seized the Capitol, and
may thus have breathed their last in the home of their fathers.
Among the events 'placed in the last portion of the mythical age
is the reception of the Claudian gens: in the year 250 Attus Clausus,
a powerful Sabine, migrated to Rome with the members and clients

1233 De publico est elatus. Livy n. 16.

34 Plutarch Publicol. c. 23. The Greek language, less rich in political
terms than the Latin, has only the single word J'iiµo' to express the whole
people and the commonalty: this has given rise to a number of misapprehen
sions.
35 The passage on this subject in Dionysius (v1. 96) desocves attention,
from the manner in which the estates are distinguished; but it is .,ftoo great
length to be inserted here.
1.-3 D
 426 HISTORY OF ROME.
of his house. Clausus is in Virgil the eponym of the house and of
the tribe, belonging to an age anterior to the Romans*: which indis­
putably agrees with the spirit of the early ages: Claudius is derived
from Clausus, as Julius is from Iulus, and is no,t a dialectic variety
of the name. I here repeal my conjecture that the Claudii replaced
· the Tarquinian house and tribe. So that the statement that two
jugers of public land were assigned to every client may perhaps be
utterly groundless; and the plebeians 1n this tribe may have been as
independent as in every other: else this would look like an attempt
to intermix tribes of clients with those composed of the free pro­
prietors1238. The one and twentieth tribe of. the year 259 must be
the Crustumine 37: this was the first that was substituted for one of
the lost ten; as also the first that was named after a place, instead
of an lndiges or Semo.
Crnstumeria is said to have been taken in the Latin wars : but
:the receiving its citizens into the Roman plebs was probably the
consequence of a treaty with the Latins. In explaining the league
with them I shall show that on that occasion their thirty towns
were newly arranged, and their number completed: for which pur­
pose Rome gave up at least one place, and the Latins in return
seem to have resigned their claim to Crustumeria. In like manner
at the end of the fourth century, when Latium after a thirty years
quarrel again entered into alliance with the Romans, and enlarged
its territories, the Roman commonalty was increased by the cession
of some places, the citizens of which formed two new tribes.
This leads me to suspect that those Sabines, who with the rem­
nant of the dissolved Tarquinian tribe made up the Claudian, came
to Rome fn like manner on the conclusion of peace with their na­
tion, and that the Claudii then for the first time became Romans

* Above note 980.

1236 Above p. 321. Livy n. lCi. His civitas data, agerque trans Anienem.
Vetus Claudia tribus-appellata. This epithet occurs nowhere else, any more
than a Claudia nova does; and it is so singular, that I should be disposed to
.read: trana Anienem veterem. Claudia tribus etc. For some of my readers
it may not be superfluous to remark that the Anio vetus was the aqueduct
from the Teverone to Rome, begun by Curius. Frontinus de Aqumd. I •
.Now ifthe region of the Claudian iribe lay between Fidenm and Ficulea, ac·
cording to the reading of Lapus and Gelenius in Dionysius (v. 40), half of it
would be on the Roman side of the river Anio; but the whole was beyond
that aqueduct. Suetonius indeed (Tiber. c. 1) says merely trans Anienem;
but this does not refute my conjecture.
37 Thi.a'' has already been conjectured by Panvinius: who however had
no ether notion on the subject, than that there had been only twenty plebeian
tribes ever since the time of Servi us.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 427
and patricians. · The author of this peace was Sp. Cassiusrns,
whose two subsequent consulships are memor;i.ble for the leagues
establishing a community of franchise with the Latins and Herni­
cans. This accordingly was that great man's plan to support the
tottering dominion of Rome, and to pave the way for her recover­
ing what she had lost; and the before mentioned increase in the
numbers of the census after 246 is accounted for, if a similar rela­
tion was entered into with the Sabines in 252 ; not indeed with the
whole nation, but with the nearest cantons: that such a compact
however cannot have been durable, is .clear from the subsequent
diminution 89•

1238 Dionysius v. 4!J. In proportion as the terms of the peace here stated,
the giving up for instance 10,000 jugers of olive plantations, have an apocry­
phal look, does his silence lose its weight as an objection to my hypothesis, the
terms were invented just like the battles, because nothing was preserved ex­
cept the bare record that a treaty was concluded.
39 See above p. 420. Re gill um lay to the south of the Anio, in the midst
of Roman towns, and so did the Claudian region.
 THE DICTATORSHIP.

THE appointment of the first dictator is placed in the tenth year

after the first consuls; and the oldest annalists say it was T. Lar­
cius. But there were divers contradictory statements, and the
vanity of the Valerian house assigned this honour to a nephew of
Publicola. According to the date just mentioned, Larr.ius was con­
sul at the time, and so only received an enlargement of his power:
another account related as the occasion of the appointment, what
sounds probable enough, that by an unfortunate choice the republic
had been placed in the hands of two consuls of the Tarquinian fac­
tion, whose names were subsequently rendered dubious by indul­
gence or by calumny.
That the name of dictator was of Latin origin, is acknowledged;
and assuredly the character of his office, invested with regal power
for a limited period, was no less so. The existence of a dictator at
Tusculum in early, at Lanuvium in very late times*, is matter of
history; and Latin ritual books, which referred to Alban tradi­
tionsI>40, enabled Macer to assert that this magistracy had subsisted
at Alba41 ; though it is true that the preservation of any historical
record concerning Alba is still more out of the question than con­
cerning Rome before Tullus Hostilius. The' Latins however did
not merely elect dictators in their several cities, but also over the
whole nation: from a fragment of Cato we learn that the Tusculan
Egerius was dictator over the collective body of the Latins•~.
!Jere we catch a glimmering of light; but we must follow it with
caution. If Rome and Latium were confederate states on a footing
of equality, in the room of that supremacy which lasted but for a

Cicero pro Milone IO (27).

1240 The J ulii had their altar in the theatre at Bovillre consecrated lege
lllbana; which would infer that there was something more thau oral tradition.
41 Dionysius v. 74.
42 Origin. u. in Priscian 1v. 4.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 429
short time after the revolution, they must have possessed the chief
command alternately : and this would explain why the Roman
dictators were appointed for only six months; and how they came
to have twenty-four lictors : namely, as a symbol that the govern­
ments of the two states were united under the same head: the con­
suls had only twelve between them, which went by turns from one
to the other. And so the dictatorship at the beginning would be
directed solely toward foreign affairs ; and the continuance of the
consuls along with the dictator would be accounted for: nay, the
dictatorship, being distinct from the office of the magister populi,
might sometimes be conferred on him, sometimes on one of the
con:mls.
The object aimed at in instituting the dictatorship,-as I will
call it from t\{e first, by the name which in course of time sup·
planted the earlier one,-was incontestably, to evade the Valerian
laws, and to re-establish an unlimited authority over the plebeians
even within the barriers and the mile of their liberties 1243 : for the
legal appeal to the commonalty was from the sentence of the con·
suls, not from that of this new magistrate. Nor does such an ap·
peal seem ever to have been introduced, not even after the power
. of the tribunes had grown to an inordinate excess: the Romans ra­
ther chose to let the dictatorship drop. The tradition accordingly
is perfectly correct in recording how the appointment of a dictator
alarmed the commonalty 44 •
That even the members of the houses at the first had no right of
appealing against the dictator to their comitia, though they had pos­
sessed such a right even under the kings, is expressly asserted by
Festus 45 : at the same time he adds that they obtained it. This is
confirmed by the example of M. Fabius; who, when his son was
persecuted by the ferocity of a dictator, appealed in his behalf to
the populus 46 ; to his peers, the patricians in the curies.

1243 6.1x.~~t'1 11.!tl d.71'011.T1lv1JP Jt!tl olH.ol x.ctl iY trtf'pa.rrala.1' itl:lv:t'To, xct.l" oil
'f'oVc 'TOO lfJµov µ6vov, ii>..t..et. x.e1,l 'Ttc1P i1:'7riwr, xe.ti i~ ttU'Tiic 'i'ifc ,Bou>iilc.
Zonaras v11. 13.
44 Creato dictatore-magnus plebem metus incessit.
45 V. Optima lex. Postquam provocatio ab eo magistratu ad populU;m
data est, qure antea non erat.
46 Pro'/Joco ad populum, aceording to the law under Tullus Hostilius,
pro'/Jocatione, cui Tullus IIostiliuscessit. Livy vm. 33. The senators repaired
from the Curia to the concio, that is, to the Comitium, hard by the Curia.
Fabius was not displeased to be sent down from the rostra to the Comitium,
where he might speak freely, as a member of the great council of the popu­
lus. The n.id of the tribunes might be serviceable in case of extremity, be­
 430 IIISTORY OF ROME.
The later Romans had only an indistinct knowledge of the dic­
tatorship, drawn from their earlier history. Excepting Q. Fabius
l\faximus in the second campaign of the second Punic war, whose
election and situation moreover were completely at variance with
ancient custom, no dictator to command an army had been appoint­
ed since 503 ; and even the comitia for elections had never been
held by one since the beginning of the Macedonian war. As ap­
plied to the tyranny of Sylla and the monarchy of Cresar, the title
was a mere name, without any ground for such a use in the ancient
constitution. Hence we can account for the error of Dion Cassius,
when, overlooking the privilege of the patricians, he expressly as­
serts that in no instance was there a right of appealing against the
dictator, and that he might condemn kriights and senators to death
without a trial 1247: as well as for that of Dionysius, who fancies he
decided on every measure at will, even about peace and war 48 ,
Such notions, out of which the moderns have drawn their phrase
dictatorial power, are suitable indeed to Sylla and Cresar: with re­
ference to the genuine dictatorship they are utterly mistaken49,
Like ignorance as to the ancient state of things is involved in
the notion of Dionysius, that, after the senate had merely resolved
that a dictator was to be appointed, and which consul was to name
him, the consul exercised an uncontrolled discretion in the choice 50 :
which opinion, being delivered with such positiv~ness, has become
the prevalent one in treatises on Roman antiquities. Such might
possibly be the case, if the dictator was restricted to the charge of
presiding over the elections, for which purpose it mattered not
who he was: in the second Punic war, in 542, the consul M. Va­
lerius Lrevinus asserted this as his right51 ; and in the first the prac­

cau~e their persons were inviolable : but in no way could the affair be brought
before the concilium of the pie bs.
1247 Zonaras quoted above, note 1243.
48 v. 70. 73. IloAiµou xctl •ip>ivn' x<t.l 71"<1.P'l"i, a."1>.Mu 7Tf«'J.'f'«'TO' xupia.
(<i.p;(,i1) ctu'To1<p<1.'TQJf xe1.l dvu7T•uBuvo,.
49 Of the latter on the contrary are we to understand the statement in
the same passage of Zonaras, that the dictator (like the consuls) could not
'draw upon the treasury beyond the credit upon it granted to him by the senate.
50 v. 73. o.J 7Tctf« ,,..;; tnµou ,,.,,, «p;x,nr 1up6µ00,_AA' ri'll'' avtpo,
..:7ToJ'e;x,B•l, iv6,, Compare the whole account just before this of the appoint­
ment ofT. Larcius.
51 The senate decreed that the consul should inquire the will of the
people M to the person to be appointed, and should proclaim him whom they
chose: the consul negabat se populum rogaturum quod sua potestatis esset.
Livy nvu. 5.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 431

tice must already have been the same; for else P. Claudius Pulcher
coul<l not have insulte<l the republic by nominating 1\1. Glycia*.
Ilut never can the disposal of kingly power have been entrusted to
the discretion of a single elector.
The pontifical lawbooks, clothing the principles of the consti­
tution after their manner in a historical form, preserved the true
account. For what other source can have supplied Dionysius with
the resolution of the senate, as it professes to be, that a citizen,
w horn the senate should nominate, and the people approve of,
should govern for six months1 252 ? The people here is the populus:
it was a revival of the ancient custom for the king to be elected by
the patricians : and that such was the form is established by posi­
tive testimony 08 •
Still oftener, indeed throughout the whole first decad of Livy,
do we read of a decree of the senate whereby ~ dictator was ap­
pointed, without any notice of the great council of the patricians 54 •

* Livy Epit. xrx. Seutonius Tiber. c. 2.

1252 "Ov ,;, ii <te ~ou"A~ .,,poi"Awr<1.1, '"" o 1;;,.,..,i'7f1{n<J>l<rn<ttt1. Dionysius
v.70.
53 M. Valerius-qui primus magister a populo creatus est. Festus v.
Optima lex. Accepto senatus dccreto ut comitiis curiatis revocatus de exilio
jussu populi Camillus dictator extemplo crearetur: Livy v. 46. Ap. Claudium
dictatorem consensu patriciorum Servilius consul dixit: vu. 6. Before the
secession of the plebs Appius was on the point of being created dictator;
but the consuls and the scniores patrmn contrived to prevent it (n. 30): so
that the annalist had in his eye an election by the juniores, that is, in this
place, the curies. The viator who carries the dictatorship to Cincinnatus
says to him: vela corpus ut proferam senatus populique Romani mandata.
Pliny xvm. 4.
54 1v. 17: Senatus dictatorem dici Mam . ../Emilium jussit.-23: Scnatus
Mam. ../Emilium dictatorcm iterum dici jussit.-46: Dictater ex S. C. dictus
Q. Servilius Priscus. vm. 17: Dictator ex auctoritate senatus dictus P. Cor­
nelius Rufinus. 1x. 20: Auctore senatu dictatorem C. Junium Bubulcum
dixit. x. 11: M. Valerium consulem omnes centuriw dixere, quern senatus
dictatorem dici jussurus erat. The whole story of Q. Fabius constraining
himself to declare his mortal enemy dictator (ix. 38) implies that L. Papirius
was already nominated, but could not enter upon his office, unless the consul
proclaimed him. Even Dionysius in one instance recognizes the nomination
or proposal by the senate. vu. 56; ll.11<Tt<TOJP v<j>' .;,.,.,,,, .,_;p,e.t,. The following
passages also apply to the election by the senate. 11. 30: Manium Valerium
creant (consules senioresque patrum).'lv. 21: Dictatorem clici A. Servilium
placet. vi. 2: Placuit dictatorem dici M. Furium Cami!lum. vn. 12: Dictato­
rem dici C. Sulpicium placuit. The following have a wider sense. m. 26:
L. Quinctius Cincinnatus consensu omnium dicitur. v1. 28: Dictatorem T.
Quinctium Cincinnatum creavere: creavere is used in reference to the comi­
tia : see for instance 1v. 11.
 432 HISTORY OF ROME.
The old mode of electing the kings was restored in all its parts :
the dictator after his appointment had to obtain the imperium from
the curies 1255 , And thus, from possessing this right of conferring
the i111perium, the patricians might dispense with voting on the
·preliminary nomination of the senate. Appointing a dictator was
an affair of urgency: some augury or other might interrupt the
curies: it was unfortunate enough that there were but too many
chances of this at the time when he was to be proclaimed by the
consul, and when the law on his impcrium was to be passed. And
after the plebeians obtained a share in the, c?nsulate, as the senate
was continually approximating to a fair mixture of the two estates,
it was a gain for the freedom of the nation, provided the election
could not be transferred to the centuries, to strengthen the senate's
power of nominating. U ndcr the old system a plebeian could not
possibly be dictator. Now as C. l\1arcius in 398 opened this office
to his own order, whereas in 393 it is expressly stated that the
appointment was approved by the patricians, it is almost certain
that the change took place within this interval. Even in 444 the
bestowal of the imperimn was assuredly more than an empty form:
but it became such by the l\Ircnian law: thenceforward it was only
requisite that the consul should consent to proclaim the person
named by the senate. Thus after that time, in the advanced state
of popular freedom, the dictatorship could occur but seldom except
for trivial purposes: and if on such occasions the appointment was
left to the consuls, they would naturally lay claim to it likewise in
those solitary instances where the office still had real importance 56 •
However, when P. Claudius insultingly misused his privilege,
the remembrance of the ancient procedure was still fresh enough
for the senate to have the po'wer of annulling the scandalous ap­
pointment. To do so, they would not even need the legal limita­
tion mentioned by Livy, that none but consulars .were eligible. A
law of those early times can only have spoken of prretors and prre­
torians: for which reason, the pr:rtor continuing to be deemed a
collegue of the consuls, it was not violated when L. Papirius Cras­

1255 Livy 1x. 38, under the year 444: (L. Papirio Cursori) lcgem curiatam
<le imperio ferenti triste omen diem diffi.dit.
56 These transitions are exhibited in the account given by Dionysius,
how at the very first establishment of the dictatorship the people committed
the choice to the senate, the senate to the consuls: as to the imperium he
knows nothing of it. All this, if he had invented it, would 'be absurd: but
he met with it in his books; and we are already acquainted with many sym­
J>olical representations of the same kind.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 433

sus was made dictator in 415: and the other cases which would
be against the rule, if interpreted strictly of such men as had ac­
tually been consuls, might probably be explained in the same way,
if we had prcetorian Fasti1957,
In a number of passages it is distinctly stated that the master of
the knights was chosen by the dictator at pleasure. But this again
must have been the more recent practice: at all events his appoint­
ment in one instance is attributed to the senate no less clearly than
that of the dictator ; as at the origin of the office it is at least in
general terms io eleciors 58 : and the decree of the plebs, which in
542 raised Q. Fulvius Flaccus to the dictatorship, enjoined him to
appoint P. Licinius Cra.ssus magister equitum*. The civil char­
acter of this officer is enveloped in total obscurity: but that he was
not merely the master of the horse and the dictator's lieutenant in
the field, is certain. I conjecture, that he was elected by the cen­
turies of plebeian knights,-as the magister populi was by the
populus, the six suffragia,-and that he was their protector5B,
The dictator may have presided at the election, letting the twelve
centuries vote on the person whom he proposed: this might after•
· ward fall into disuse, and he would then name his brother magis.:­
trate himself.

1257 Did Rome excite the attention of Aristotle ? As he never in the

Politics quotes its constitution, which in his days was just in its prime, he
must in fact have been unacquainted with it. But the remark (Polit. iv.10),
iv fl-"ffl>ri.p"'v '?"1crlv 11ipouv"?"111 11u'l"oxpri.'l"opri.' p.~vri.px•v,, probably refers to the
Romans, as well as the Samnites and Lucanians. He refers to the analogous
example of the <£Symnetes; and Dionysius does exactly the same when speak­
ing of the dictatorship. '
58 .Livy vm. 17 :·Dictator ab consulibus ex auctoritate senatus dictus
P. Cornelius Rufinus, magister equitum M. Antonius. n. 18: of Larcius and
Sp. Cassiu~-creatos invenio. Consvlares legere.
* Livy xxvn. 5. '. .
59 Hence a plebeian would be eligible to this office even before the Li­
cinian law. See above, p. 397. There seems to be a reference to the ple­
beian knights, where C. Servilius Aha.la is sent by the dictator to Sp. Mrelius.
· Livy xv. 14.

I.-3E
THE COMMONALTY BEFORE THE SECES­

SION, AND THE NEXI.

THE appointment of the dictator by the curies was a step back­

ward from, the constitution of Servius, evincing a settled plan to
rob the plebeians of its advantages and honours, while its burthens
were still to remain with them : and it was the prelude to a far .
worse usurpation, by which the plebs was deprived of its right of
electing the consuls in the centuries, as it had already been deprived
of its share in the consulship. Possessing the dictatorial power,
which they might either exercise or hold out in terror, the patri·
cians were strong enough to engage in a plan for stripping their
free countrymen of all their rights, and reducing them individually
to slavery. Had it been executed with caution, the atrocious de­
sign might have succeeded: its failure, as is often the case, was
owing to their mad impatience and precipitance, and to that cupidity
which cannot wait until usurpation in its strnggle against the feel­
ings of freedom has cleared the course for it.
After the banishment of the Tarquins the government behaved
kindly to the commonalty. It is related that all duties were then
done away with; and that the city took the salt trade into its own
hands, to stop the extortion of the retail dealers 1260 • As to the
statement that the plebs was exempted from tribute, it must either
mean; that the whole charge of paying the troops was thrown upon
the rerarians*, or that the arbitrary taxation introduced under the
last Tarquinius was abolished. The Valerian laws restored the
good laws of king Servius with regard to life, personal security, and
honour. In like manner the first consuls are said to have renewed
the laws which prohibited pledging the person 61 : that the guilds
and their motes were re-established, follows of course.

1260 Livy n. 9. * See above, p. 361.

61 Dionyeius v. 2. K<ti 'toil, pop.OU' 'tOU' 11'1pl 'l"lllV a-uµ~o>..itlaiv 'tOU'
 , HISTORY OF ROME. 435

But it was only while Tarquinius excited alarm, and till the hard
war with Etruria was ended, that the government, as Sallust says,
ruled with justice and moderation. When this was over, the pa•
tricians dealt with the plebeians as with l!laves, tyrannically mal·
treated them and even sported with their lives, turned them out of
the public domain, and wielded the government alone, to the ex­
clusion of their fellow-citizens: by which outrages, and above all
by the pressure, of usury, the commonalty, being forced at once to
pay tribute and to serve in never ceasing wars, was at last driven
into insurrection. This representation has been adopted by the
greatest father of the western church as evidently true 1262• To the
same elfect Livy relates that, so long as Tarquinius was living in
exile, the favour of the plebs was courted: but that after his death
the nobles began to maltreat it03 • I repeat, that chronological
statements with regard to this period are totally idle; only it is too
gross a violation of all probability in Livy, to place .the king's
death, the change in the conduct of the patricians, and the beginning
of its fruits, the first disturbance, all within the same year. Some
annalist must have mentioned the evil, which ·without doubt had
been waxing worse and worse during several years, for the first
time retrospectively at the epoch when it reached its full growth.
That the oligarchy should have been strong enough, when aided
by the terrors of the dictatorship, openly to revive the ancient
laws of debt, is no way incredible: but when we find these laws
not only remaining unaltered at the peace between the two estates,
but for half a century after those of Licinius, great doubts are cast
on the 1Story that they had already been abolished twice in the very
early ages. Be this as it may, that difference between the rights
of the. two orders, which afterward caused the need for the legisla·
tion of the decemvirs, was here so deeply rooted, that it lasted for
four generations after the laws of the twelve tables: and hence.
Livy, when he is about to relate the abolition of bondage for debt,
says, this was the commencement of a new freedom for the plebs 0•.
This remark clearly belongs to an old annalist, not to Livy: and it
may therefore be regarded as a dis~inct assertion on what otherwise

.;,,.. 'Tu».~t.u i'P"-'i>lV'T"'• <;>1A ..FBpa0'1'0U' '"'' JH(A•'<'lltOUC .1,.., J.,..;;,.,.,,,, olir
,;,''11'«'1Td.C x.a.'TeAuo-t T~px.Uv1oc:, dvnt&icret.vrro.
12G2 Augustin de Civitate Dei 11. 18. ·
63 n. 21. Plebi, cui ad eam diem summa ope inservitum erat, injurire
a primoribus fieri cwpere. .
64 vin. 28. Eo anno plebi Romanre velut aliud initium libertatis fac­
tum est, quod nccti dcsierunt.. See above p. 323.
 436 HISTORY OF ROME~
could only be inferred, though with perfect certainty; namely, that
the pressure of this system fell on the plebeian debtor alone. As
to the patrician, he can never have either pledged his person by
covenant, or been sentenced to servitude by the law.
Now if the only difference had been, that the original citizens
enjoyed a better state of law within their own body, this would
have bred no feud between the two estates: the plebs might have
passed' a resolution to adopt the same system, and would have had
no trouble in obtaining the sanction of the ruling cl~ss for it, if re­
quisite. But unfortunately it was the interest of the patricians to
stand up for the cruel practice of personal pledges, as much as for
any privilege of their order. Livy himself in spite of his preju­
dices does not suppress what was to be read in the Annals; that
every patrician house was a gaol for debtors, and that in seasons
· of great distress, after every sitting of the courts, herd3 of sentenced
slaves were led away in chains to the houses of the noblesse 1 ~ 65 • Dio­
nysius too represents king Servius as saying, that the cruel usury
of the patricians, who by its means were reducing the free citizens
to servitude, and .their pretensions to the exclusive occupation of the
public domain, were the motives which urged them to plot his
death 66 : and in the decisive case where the abominable conse­
quences of this system led to its abolition, the usurer, L. Papirius,
was a patrician; his. victim a plebeian, C. Publilius~.
Nay they appear in these cases not like persons who from their
superior power come for~ard in behalf of others as well as of
themselves, but as if they alone were concerned; and this too so
late as in the year 397, when a reasonable limitation to the rate of
interest is e!lgerly determined upon by the plebs, but gives offence
to the patricians67. Not that we can suppose the plebeians to have
been without the power of proceeding after the same sys.tern: only
if they wished to abuse it by stretching it to the utmost, they
might be restrained, as they were subsequently by the tribunes of
the people, so even in those days by the magistrates whose office
1265 v1. 36. Gregatim quotidie de foro addictos duci, et repleri vinctis
nobiles domos: et ubicunque patricius habitet, ibi carcerem privatum esse.
66 1v. 11. Mt,unrun<1.I ,uo1 'Tlrtc ix '1'"'' '1f'<1.'1'pud,.., d.'1t'01t'T•iv"1 ,u• O"uvo ­
p.ru,uiro1,-,;, 'TO• IM,uor .• ~ 1rt'1f'olu.<1.-ti.;t.B6,utvo1-oi d<1.H1<1''1'<1.l µIr, O'TI '1'orJc
w,r,,'f'ctr Uµ.;c oUx. tittcrrL tr>lr iA1vB1plcu ti.q>tt1ptBii1tt.1 Vw· ttUrrt11r '!Tpdr .'f'tt. XJfrt.
&;i:.SirT~ (read "'"'"';t.9lv'1'<1.c), oi J'f 1t<t'1'<1.vo<1'qi1t6,utro1 '1'<1. J'n,u6"''"' 1<. '1'. >..
* Livy vm. 28.
67 Haud reque lreta patribus-de unciario fcenore-rogatio est perlata:
et plebs a1iquanto eam cupidius scivit. Livy vu. 16. Manlius too (v1. 14)
vociferatus de superbia patrum, ae crudelitate fceneratorum, et miseriis plebis:
 HISTORY OF ROME. 437

gave rise to that of these tribunes: and the free possessor of heredi­
taTy property might screen himself against the persecution of a
brother plebeian, by becoming the client of a patrician •. Probably
however the main part of the loans were merely negotiated in the
name of patricians on account of their clients, who were forced to
appear in the person of their patrons, and who also reaped the
greatest advantage from doing so. If a· foreigner practised such
usury, he had without doubt, beside the ordinary burthens of client­
ship, to pay, like the freedmen, a particular sum to his lord.
Now that in these early times not the slightest trace should be
found of usury ·carried on by the plebeians, is the more remarkable,
because in the latter ages of the republic the plebeian knights were
the very class among whom it struck root; although Cato had pro­
nounced it to be no better than highway-robbery; while on the
other hand ariong the members of the few remaining patrician
houses hardly a single one has been charged with this disgraceful
trade: a memorable· instance, that virtues and vices are· not heir­
looms in particular families or classes of society; but that the power
of doing what they list misleads such as are not restrained by re­
spect for the opinion of the better disposed among their fellow­
countrymen and equals, while on the other hand the necessity of
keeping watch over our honour preserves us from depravity; that
a aominant faction is ever ~ure to transgress, aud thereby to set its
adversaries in a favourable light.
In all countries men in need have had the wretched right of sell­
ing themselves and their families: it obtained among the northern
nations as well as among the Greeks and in Asia. The right of
the creditor to seize his insolvent debfor as a servant, and by his
labour or by the sale. of his person to repay himself so far as this
went, was scarcely le~s widely spread. · Akin in their origin and
in their results, these rights are yet substantially different; and if
we draw a proper distinction between them, the ancient Roman
law of debt becomes perfectly clear and simple.
Debts may be incurred either by a direct loan, or by breach of
an obligation to some payment: besides, according to the Roman
.Jaw, certain offences created such an obligation, as larceny and the
like. Now whether the debt arose from such offences or other­
wise, whoever, after the prretor had given sentence, failed to dis­
charge it within the legal term, was consigned by the law to the
creditor as his bondman: but he was addictus, and not nexus 196".

1268 So was the person who had pledged himself and did not redeem him­
 438 HISTORY OF ROME.
A person became nexus, when by a regular Quiritary bargain be­
fore witnesses, for money weighed out to him, he disposed of
himself, and consequently of all that belonged to him; whereby
under the form of a sale he in reality pledged himself: into this
state none could come except by his own act and deed.
For, as we learn from the well known testimony of JElius
Gallus 1 ~ 69 , every transaction according to Quiritary law and with
these forms was a nexum: and it is an utter mistake, which more­
over occurs only among the moderns, to derive the name of the
nexi from their fetters, and to suppose that they were slaves in
fetters for debt. At the first every such transaction, as is too plain
to need proof, was an actual sale. But the ingenuity of the Roman
jurists contrived by means of these forms to establish a system of
pledging, whereby the seller was to keep possession of what he
had sold, and to redeem his pledge on repaying the money he had
received as an earnest: while on the other hand, if the money was
not repaid, the creditor laid claim to his property befoi:e the prretor.
The same form was given to a number of other transactions and
proceedings, such as marriage by co-emption, the fictitious sale of
children for their emancipation, wills, and so on. All these, to­
gether with the actual transfer of property, are comprehended in
the definition given by Varro from Manilius 70 : and in this wider
sense Sylla allowed all ·th~ nexa of the new citizens, whom he de­
prived of their franchise, to stand, as well as their rights of inherit­
ancen. But the fictitious sales were so frequent, the transactions
carried on under the form of such sales were so important, that it
became necessary to have a peculiar name for them. Hence usage
restricted the general term to these, excluding the mancipia, the

self within the term fixed: he then ceased to be nexus. Hence Dionysius, in
the classical passage on the subject (vi. 83), only discriminates between the
addiction incurred by debt and from offences. Menenius offers to cancel all
the nexa of the insolvent (-rov' i<Pel>.ov-r<1.,. ;ve<1. ul ,..~ Ju,«µhou' l1<1.xur1UB<1.1,
<1.<P•'irB«1 'Tt»t O<fX•µ«-r1»v); to set at liberty all such as wer~ addicti from
having failed in their payments (ei -rlY"'' -r« rr~µ«Ta. ~?rtpnµlp1»1 on1»• <r«ir
•oµiµo1, ?rpoBea-µi"" x«-r<1;:,1-r«1); and in like manner all those who were so
on account of a delictum privatum punishable with a fine (d'ix"'" «Xo•nr ili<LW
not state criminals).
126!) In Festus. Nexum est, ait Gallus lElius, quodcumque per res et li­
bram geritur, idque necti dicitur, quo in gener!J sunt hrec: testamenti factio 1
nexi datio, nexi liberatio. .
70 De L. L. v1. 5. p. 100. Nexum Manilius scribit omne quod per li­
bram et res gcritur, in quo eint mancipia. So the Florentine MS.
"71 Cicero pro Crecina 35{102). lta tulit de civitate, ut non sustulerit
horum nexa atquc hrereditates.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 439

actual transfers of property: and so Varro after S.crevola defined a

nexum. to be the form where a thing is pledged, but not alie­
nated•979,
As the meaning of this word changed in process of time, so
Varro's definition of a nexus does not apply quite correctly except
to a single case. No doubt when a freeman had contracted by
servile labour to work off the debt for which he had pledged his
person in a Quiritary sale, he was a nexus7 8:·only one must not
restrict the meaning of the term to this. Whosoever had pledged
his person in this way was nexus or nexu vinctus' 4; even if he
could not possibly become liable to discharge his debt by service.
Such as had no property must always have concluded their loans
under this form: those who had would be able even in those days
to give their land as security: in most cases however a person
threatened with a sentence of addiction would probably enter into
a nexum, that he might escape for the time fro1• that misfortune.
If any one whose creditor laid claim to him before the prretor75 ,
did not redeem himself, his lot was chains and corporal punish­
ment, and all the hardships of slavery76,

1272 In the same place. Mucius (Screvola is an interpolation) qure per

res et libram fiant ut obligentur, prroter quro (1mlg. prreter quam qure. Flor.
prreter quam) mancipio dentur,-id est ('Dulg. idem) quod obligatur per li­
bram, neque suum fit ('mug. sit). The p~rson whose nexum was released by
payment, was tETe ct libra liberatus: Livy v1. 14. Hence nexa liberatur, Cicero
de Re p. II. 34. '
73 In the same place. Liber qui ~uas operas in servitutem (so Flor.­
'l!ulg. servitute) pro pecunia quam debebat, dabat dum solveret (Flor. debebat
dum s . .,,ulg. debeat dum s.), nexus vocatur.
74 The two terms are without doubt equivalent: the former is opposed
to solutus in the Twelve Tables, the latter in Livy n. 23: Nexu 'l!incti solutique
11e undique in publicum proripiunt: where Doujat's explanation, which has
unaccountably been neglected, is no less certain than obvious. .See Draken­
borch's note. Sigonius had a glimmering of the truth: but his change­
nexi, 'l!incti, solutique-corrupts the text.
75 This addiction is referred to in the passages of Livy quoted in note
1265, and in the words u7rtpn~tfflJV d.11'"-f'"'I',; in Dionysius Vl. 23.
76 On servitude for debts not incurred by borrowing I shall speak in the
second volume, after the laws of the Twelve Tables, in which it is so memo­
rable a feature; although these laws must by no means be considered as its
primary source. I shall also recur to it when I come to the Poetelian law.
But as opinions delivered by word of mouth are apt to get abroad in a mis­
taken shape, I will here lay down the following propositions beforehand.
The Poetelian law merely did away with the nexumofthe person, in room of
which the jiducia of property became universal: but it made no·change in the
li.ddictiori for debttl or offences; and the latter certainly lasted even beyond
the end efthe second Punic war. This however was likewise abolished; and
 440 HJSTORY OF ROME.
So long as-a nexus was not addiclus, he enjoyed the same rights
as every other full citizen: this was expressly secured to him by
the laws 1277, But on the other hand he who was adjudged as a
slave, lost his civic rights 78 : thus he underwent that demin~tio
capitis79 , of which it is true that our civil lawbouks make no men­
tion, because we have nothing of Manilius or Sca!vola, and those
who wrote under the emperors lived long after it had been forgotten;
of which however we have. indisputable evidence in the circum­
stance that an action which endangered.a person's civic character
-a judicium turpe-was a causa capitis, though no way affecting
his life. In the same manner a cause where the question was,
whether the possession of a person's goods had, been adjudged
(addicta) by the sentence of the pra!tor, was a causa capitis 80 :
because this addiction had been substituted for that of the person.
When a debtor was delivered up to his creditor, such of his chil­
dren and grandch¥dren as were subject to his authority went into
slavery with him: as was the case when state-criminals were sold
along with their family 81 • This state of the law was known. to
those annalists who made the old soldier tell_ the people, that the
usurer had carried him and his two sons into 'slavery*; and who
represented the edict of the consul Servilius as ordaining that,
if a debtor-slave 92 were willing to serve, his creditor should not

in its stead came the possessio bonorum debitoris: the very expression sectio
bonorum reminds us of the sectio corporis debitoris. ·
1277 Nexo solutoque idem jus esto.
78 The consul Servilius promises the plebeians that during the cam­
paign 'fr/l.a"d. ,«er ova-ftt., ?rotV J'j a-Clµ.«, 'frd.a"tt. J'' l'1"1Tlf<ld. '1"0'MTOIJ 'POiiµ.tt.IOIJ
shall continue a.ppua-1d.a-'l'oc tt.?ro "' J'<1.ruou &otl ,;>-.Mu ?ran~t a-uµ.~011.<1.1ou.
Dionysius v1. 41. And Appius says (v1. 5D) that he had lost money by !everal
of his debtors, but had never made any ?rp6a-Ge-ror oiJJ'' a."-r1µ.or. ­
7D Deminutus capite appellatur-qui liber alteri mancipio datus est.
Festus.
80 Hence the affair of P. Quinctius was so (Cicero pro Quinct. 9. (32)):
and the question was, whether his bun.a in reality possessa fuerint nee ne.
Caput was the title in the censorian register, comprising every thing set down
under it with regard to a person's condition: every change made therein on
his becoming deterio-ris juris was -a deminutio capitis. They who are familia,r
with the Roman notions will not need many words to understand, that, for
instance, the degrading a plebeian to be an rerarian, or his removal into a tri­
bus minus honesta on being found guilty of ambitus or the like, were each a
capitis deminutio. - ·
81 lpse familiaque ad redem Cereris veneat.
* Dionysius v1. 26.
82 An addictus, not a nexus: the former class was again called out. in
the second Punic war.
 llISTORY OF ROME. 441

keep his children or grandchildren in confinemcnti~ss. This circum­

stance was the main reason for the emancipation of children, a mea­
sure which according to the Roman law on domestic rights could
otherwise scarcely have occurred.
If we once gain a clear insight into this law of debt, we have
solved the perplexity which led Dionysius to take such strange
views, and which thereby has introduced such momentous errors
into Roman history.
The Annals related that the persons who seceded on account of
their debts were in the legions: but how was it consistent with the
Servian constitution, for men to serve therein, who had forfeited
their freedom to their creditors, and so were poorer than a prole­
tarian if he was clear from debts? Dionysius he.re again takes the
perverse -course of reconciling these contradictory statements by the
groundless assertion that they served JS slingerss 4 : according to
which men with less than nothing would have stood in the fifth
class. And what would the Servian constitution have been worth,
if the hoplites and knights had been unable to make head against
the Ull'armed populace?
The plebeians however who left the camp, were nexi, whose
freedom and property were merely pledgedss: and many others,
who were not suffering under the same pressure, may have joined
them from sympathy, and with a view to avail themselves of cir­
cumstances for the furtherance of political freedom. The army
might be levied according to the classes; and yet the majority of
the hoplites might consist of persons who, when their debts became
payable, would not even be secure of personal liberty. There are
but too many countries where a like state of things is to be found;
where most of the landl1-0lders, though ostensibly they continue to
be so, were they to discharge their debts, would have nothing left;
and till that time comes farm their estates for their creditors, as the
Roman debtor farmed his for the usurer86 • Now if, where a nation

1283 Livy u. 24. Ne quis militis-liberos nepotesve moraretur. Diony­

sius v1. 29. M>l'Tt )'tt•' rJ.V'T,;, ,.,..,,:,_m. This foreigner misapprehended his
authorities and the nature of the law in VI. 37. For there can never have
been any need of releasing the relations of the nexi in an ascending line.
84 v. 67. npo.-9n""' µolp"-• h17xor 'Toi, h <1>dMt-l' 'TnrJ.-rµlrm-µnJlr
<1>ipon" ;;,..M,, 071 µ~ .-c;>nJarctr.
85 If there is any ground for the story of the calling out the addicti, they
can only have entered into the irregular bodies, the civic legions. Probably
however it is wholly apocryphal.
· 86 Dionysius vi. 79. Tolr J<t.YftO"'TrJ.ir-~•"-)'"rJ.taµ•9"- 'Toti, i.,u.,..;,
x>..npour t-•»n•iv.
J,-3 F
 442 HISTORY OF ROME.

is thus ciroumstauced, the distribution of political rights be propor·

tionecl to the land tax paid, it would be so far from agreeing with
the relative state of property, that the main part of. the citizens
electing and eligible to offices might be in a destitute, or even des­
perate condition. ·
Here is the proof I promised above, that the tribute was not paid
out of the net income: for it corresponded to the census; and if•
debts had been deducted i:i assessing this, the nexi could not have
stood in the classes, or served in the legions. To have explained
the nexum in the passage where this was before asserted 1267 , would
have grafted one episode upon another. As a further confirmation
I will here add, that the liquidation of debts in the year 403 ren·
dered a census necessary : because, in adjusting the state of pro·
perty with the demands of creditors upon it, a number of things
changed their owners 88 • Under an income-tax the only difference
would have been, that a person who till then had paid for ten thou·
sand ases of outstanding money would now have paid for the same
sum vested in land: while the previous possessor, even before he
parted with his estate, would not have been taxed for it. Owing
to this the patricians, though they appear as the capitalists, are no
way affected by the tribute 89 , which is represented as a tax peculiar
to the plebs 90•
In the Roman contracts for the use of money the regular condi·
tion was that the sum should be repaid after a stated term: which
in those times, as the arguments to be brought forward in another
part of this history will prove, must certainly have been the year
of ten months. The rate of interest was unrestricted, and therefore
exorbitant : the first legal limitation of it to ten per cent'was a
great relief to the plebs: no wonder then that it is spoken of as
having been an ordinary case, for the accumulated interest to raise

1287 Above p. 356. ·

88 Livy vu. 22. Quia solutio roris alieni multarum rerum mutaverat
dominos.
89 The patricians have been making a present out of their neighbours'
purses, say the tribunes, when it is determined to give the troops pay; inas­
much as it can only be raised tributo indicto. Livy 1v. 60. Such touches
come from the annalists.
90 The tribunes deplore the fate of the plebs, ~ nunc etiam vectig<ilis
facta sit, ut, cum incuUa omnia invenerint, tributum ex affecta re familiari pend­
am. Livy v. 10. They bring forward the agrarian law and forbid the col­
lecting the tribute. v. 12. On another occasion however plebes coacta huic
oneri succumbere, because the government did not want any levies: quem de­
lectum impedirem, 1Wn habe.bant tribuni. v1. 32.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 443
the principal to many times its original amount1ll9 1 • It was the
custom to convert the principal when <lue, together with the inter­
est, into a new debt (versura): the discharge of which must soon
have become utterly impossible. To understand the condition of
the plebeian debtors, let the reader, if he is a man of business, ima­
gine that the whole of ihe private debts in a given country were
turned into bills at a year, bearing interest at twenty per .cent or
more; and that the non-payment of them were followed on sum­
mary process by imprisonment, and by the transfer of the debtor's
whole property to his creditor, even though it exceeded what he
owed. \Ve do not need those further circumstances which are
incompatible with our manners, the personal slavery of the debtor
and of his children, to form an estimate of the fearful condition of
the unfortunate plebeiansn 2 ,
Their wretchedness was consummated by a ~ystem of base in­
justice. · The plebeians formed the whole infantry of the line : and
yet not only was all share in the conquered lands refused to them;
even the plunder, which a Roman soldier, unless it was given up
to him, had to deliver in upon oath, was often kept back from them:
not that it was employed for national purposes ; it went into the
common che3t of the patricians93 •
This picture of distress-not unlike the one placed before our
eyes by the misery of hundreds of thousands, who are now going
to \vreck and ruin in seaport towns where every fortune is broken
and all commerce is lost, and in manufacturing districts where work
is at a stand-deluded Dionysius; so that when the whole com­
monalty was driven into insurrection, he looked upon them as no­
thing else than a similar low starving multitude, to which idlers,
libertines, vagabonds, such as harboured ill will against their neigh­
bours, and such as were malcontents from temper or interest, at­
tached themselves 9 ~. The positiveness of this statement has had

1291 Livy v1. 14. Multiplici jam sorte exsoluta, mergentibus semper·
sortem usuris.
!J2 The practice of mortgaging landed property prevailed at Athens
even before the time of Solon, and subsisted along with that of pledging the
person, which was afterwards abolished. At Rome the state of things would
not admit of it : for it was equally inconsistent with the nature of the plebeian
property, and with the usufructuary possession of the patricians.
93 For p1wlicmn is poplicum, what belongs to the populiis. See above
note 1106. Hence the commonalty is incensed malignitate patrum pti mili­
tem prll!dafraudavere.-Qiticquid captum est vcndidit consul, ac redcgu in J11Lb­
licu1n. Livy 1i. .42. There are many other like passages.
!J4 Dionysius VI. 46.
444 HISTORY OF ROME.
an imposing effect; and it has been entirely overlooked that Livy,
though no way partial to the plebs, and though he certainly had not
a clear insight into the nature of the several orders in early times,
still has not a word which, if rightly understood, can give even a
shadow of support to such an opinion.
A Greek writer indeed could hardly escape being deceived: in
the first place because his language, poorer and less exact in its
political terms than the Roman, had only the one word demus to
render both populus and plebs1295 • Even in Aristotle's time· this
word had a variety of senses, and in democracies denoted the na·
tion and assembly of the people as opposed to the magistrates, in
oligarchies the commonalty; while popular usage employed it for
the needy and common folk. In the days of Augustus, many as
were the Greek cities and those that pretended to be so, there per·
haps was not one in which an oligarchy had kept its ground; and
democracies were rare: the Romans had every where introduced
timocracies : and under these, tl1ough the general assembly of the
citizens also bore the name of demus, yet at the same time it was
applied, and that too in a stricter sense, to those inhabitants who,
from not possessing the requisites for civic honours, were expressly
excluded by the law, or at all events in fact, from the senate and
from offices a~ common people. The civic plebs too, which-Dio­
nysius found at Rome in the eighth century, was undeniably a
demus of this sort; formed by the body of those who partook of
the largesses destined for the capital 90 ; and consisting mainly of
freedmen and semi-citizens. The respectable countrypeople and
municipals 97 were completely separate from it: still higher stood the
knights, many thousands in number ::at top of all the noblesse which
had coalesced with the remains of the patricians.
That all these nevertheless were plebeians in a constitutional point
of view,-that the whole.Roman nation was so, except the fifty pa­
trician houses which were ·still preserved 98 , and the patrician fami­
lies newly incorporated by Julius Cresar and Augustus,-this was
certainly known to Dionysius. In his later books too he cannot

1295 TI6>-i~ and n-oAi1a.1 may in earlier times have been equivalent to popu­
lus, nay the former may perhaps be the same word: this definite meaning
however it did not retain. ·
96 As the plebs urbana is opposed to the thirty-five tribes.

97 The Romani rustici.

98 See p. 251, note 833. I remind the reader of Capito's definition

quoted above in note 821. Gaius 1. 3. Piebis appellatione sine patriciis ceteri
cives &ignificantur.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 445
possibly have ranked the leading plebeians, after the consulate was
placed within their reach, among the common people: how could
he forget however his having related but a couple of pages before
the description just referred to, that Valerius had enrolled four
hundred plebeians among the knights on account of theirwealth12001
One might indeed imagine that the idea of that equestrian middle
class, which occupied the interval between the senate and the people,
was floating before his mind: but such an idea in this place must
have vanished again the moment he tried to fix it.
If a fore.igner, having heard of the misery of the Irish peasant,
that he farms the land, which was the freehold of his ancestors, at
a. rack-rent, the unprotected and forsaken client of greedy or neg­
ligent patrons, should be led by this to look upon all the Irish
Catholics as paupers and beggars, he could not but be exceedingly
surprised if told, that they claim a share .in the highest honours of
the state, and to be eligible into the lower house, when such eligi­
. bility both legally and in fact implies the possessjon of considerable
landed property. Unless he were informed that the wretched
peasantry are but a part of the whole class, which also comprises
members of the nobility and of the middle ranks, he would be just
as little able, as Dionysius was, to extricate himself from similar
confusion. But when we take a correct view of them, this very
body of the Irish Catholics may furnish our age with a perfect
parallel to the state of the plebs: they too, like the plebs, are a
commonalty ; the despair of the poor amongst them is the strongest
weapon of the upper ranks; and the indignities these arc exposed
to would be matter of indifference to their inferiors, unless they
were all forced into one body by the pressure of the laws. In one
point however there is an enormous difference·: the millions in
Ireland who are ready to stake their lives for the pretensions of
their superiors, would not, though the latter should gain their ends,
see a single one among their vague hopes of better times accom­
plished; whereas the lower plebeians were seeking for determinate
relief to their own actual wants. If England three generations ago
hacl granted .the full enjoyment of her civic rights in individual
cases, this would have disarmed the Catholics, and separated the
higher orders from the populace and the priests who agitate it: at
Rome similar measures would not have been availing to hinder
distress f10m breaking out in violence, which the poor man pro­
mised himself would release him from his debts and give him a
field of his own. ·
1299 Dionysius v1. 44.
 446 HISTORY OF ROME.

When an error has been firmly rooted for centuries, it can hardly
be superfluous to bring forward a variety of definite instances in
illustration of the truth. The Roman plebs, formed as it was by
the incorporating whole bodies of citizens and countrypeople,
might be compared to the Vaudese dependent on the city of Bern,
among whom the old Burgundian 11obles stood on the same footing
with the townsmen and the peasantry, as contrasted with the sove­
reign canton. Or if the reader be familiar with the history of Flo­
rence, let him imagine that the republic had united the inhabitants
of the whole distretto into a commonalty: in this the counts Guidi
and the castellans 1800 of Mugello, as opposed to the ruling estate,
would not by the principles of the law stand above the ,houses of
of Pistoja or Prato, nay, above the common citizen or yeoman from
the Val d' Arno: at the same time the former might notwithstand­
ing be equal, perhaps more than equal, to the Uberti and the other
proudest houses in the ruling city, even according to their own no­
tions of nobility. As in a later age the Mamilii, who traced their
pedigree from Ulysses and Circe, were admitted among the plebe­
ian citizens ; so there can be no question that the families of plebe­
ian knights in the earliest times were the nobility of the distretto;
that the first leaders of the plebs, the Licinii and Icilii, were no·way
inferior even in birth to the Quinctii and Postumii.
Hut it was not the splendour flowing from a few families of this
sort, that gave such respectability to the Roman plebs: it w~s their
essential character as a body of landholders, such as it is denoted
by their Quiritary property. The ancients universally esteemed
agriculture to be the proper business of the freeman, as w.ell as the
proper school of the soldier. The countryman, says Cato, has
the fewest evil thoughts. In him the old stock of the nation is pre­
served: while it changes in cities, where foreign merchants and
tradesmen Bettle, and the natives remove whithersoever gain lures
1
them. In every country where slavery prevails, freedmen seek
their maintenance by occupations of this kind, in which they not
unfrequently grow wealthy: thus among the ancients, as in after­
times, such trades were mostly in the hands of this class, and were
therefore thought disreputable to a citizen: hence the opinion that
admitting the artisans to full civic rights was a hazardous mea­
sure1, and would transform a nation's character. The ancients
1300 Cattane.i.
1 As a general principle they were excluded among the early Greeks.
Corinth forms an exception, which we know of; there may have been others
unknown to us; but at all events they were only exceptions.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 447

had no notion of a government carried on with dignity by guilds,

such as we see it in the history of the towns during the middle
ages : and yet even in them it is undeniable that the military spirit
sank, as the guilds gained the upper hand of the houses, and that
at last it became wholly extinct ; and with it fell the character and
the freedom of the towns. Even at this day the Italian peasants,
if proprietors, are an extremely honest and worthy race, and
infinitely preferable to the townspeople: agriculture is their nation's
true calling, as a sea life is that of the Greeks, and even of the
Neapolitans.
The Roman plebs in early ages consisted exclusively of land­
holders and field-labourers; and even if many of its members were
reduced to poverty and thus stripped of their estates, at least it con­
tained no one who earned his livelihood by any other employment;
by commerce any more than by handicrafts 130 ~. It was a duty of the
censorian office, and that too we may be assured even before it
was entrusted to a particular magistracy, to see that none but an
industrious husbandman kept his place in the tribe of his fathers: a
bad farme~ was erased from it; much more so then was he who
entirely deserted. his vocation3 • Even the plebeians of the four
civic tribes must be deemed to have been landholders at the first:
on the one hand within the vast compass of the walls there was
room left at least for gardens and vineyards ; on the other hand the
country-citizens had houses and barns in the city.
It is true, Dionysius, who thus distinctly asserts that the plebe­
ians were prohibited from every employment unconnected with
husbandry, says in another place that Romulus assigned agricul­
ture, pasturage, and the various money-making trades to them as
their calling 4 • This however occurs in his description of the man­
ner in which the Roman people was pretended to have been origi­
ginally arranged by Uomulus as their founder; a description trans­
ferred from that of a Roman antiquarian :who understood his sub­
ject, and had represented the circumstances of those times when as

1302 OuJnl 6~iir 'P.,µ.e1.{.,, •.;,,., u,..,,.., oun it"P'"'x.nv JZlor. ~X"' · Di­
onysius u. 25. The punishment can have consisted only in the censorian
brand, the striking out a person's name from his tribe, as was the case with
those who practised stage-playing: not that any peculiar disgrace was at­
tached to doing so, but because it was a civic trade. • , ·
3 Gellius 1v. 12. Si quis agrum suum-indiligenter curabat-censores
rerarium faciebant.
4 ftl»f'J'lir, 1<or.l 1<'1"~Vo'l"pO~JlV, 1<1tl 'l"<t' XJHfUL'T07f0lOU' •rr<tS•irBit• 'l"t:t,Vor.~.
II. 9.
448 HISTORY OF ROME.
yet the state consisted of none but patricians and clients : only the
Greek writer was led astray by the delusion that the clients and the
plebeians were the same body1ao 5 •
The source of this error was evidently, that even in the eighth
century a clientsl1ip was still subsisting, not only connecting the
freedmen among the above mentioned city plebs with their patrons,
but also many persons of good birth, who wanted wealth or favour­
able circumstances to aid them in their efforts to advance them­
selves, with a patron of their own choosing; and generally the citi­
zens of the municipal towns with the house to the protection of
which their native places had anciently entrusted themselves .. Now
this relation was no more like the ancient respectable clientship,
than the city plebs of those times was like the ancient respectable
commonalty: yet the same confusion, along with the subsequent
reception of the clients into the tribes by the decemvirs*, has in
one instance beguiled Livy into the notion that the individual ple­
beians were clients of the individual patricians 6 ; alt~ough else­
where he abounds in passages which place the difference of the two
classes, nay their counterposition, in the clearest light. And Dio­
nysius himself, deliberately as he entertained that fundamental
error, constantly makes the same distinction between them in his
running narrative, because the genuine expressions of the Annals
were there lying before him.
Similar accounts are followed by I~ivy, when he relates that on
occasion of a violent dispute between the two orders the common­
a1ty withdrew entirely from the election of consuls, and that it was
held by tne patricians and their clients alone7: · It is possible that
this may be a misrepresentation of an ~lection taken entirely away
from the centuries : if so, it arose from a recollection how the affair
was managed on a more recent occasion, when the plebs in despair
retired from the comitia•. Ile further relates, that before the trial

1305 II. 8. 'E1<«Afl Tou~ i1 T~ 1<«T<1.J'U1rTEf~ TU;\'..~ DAH,g1iou~, me I' i{,

"E.AAHrtc ,;.,..,., J'Hf<OT11t0'5c. n. 9. Detp«1<«T«e,;""' u,.,.. <roic 1r«<rp1,./01c
'TOUC .!Hf<O'TIJ<ouc, t7l"17po{«c t1<<1.rr1'!' or <1.U'TO~ !,goUAl'TO r£µm 1rporr/«1HY•
* See the text to note 728, Vol. n.

6 VI. 18. Q.uot clientes circa singulos fuistis patronos.

7 II. 64. lrata plebs interesse consularibus comitiis noluit. Pe-r patres

clientesque patrum COf!sules creati : that is, by the curies, and by the centu­
ries without the plebs.
8 Because the Licinian law was about to be violated-plebis eo dolor
erupit ut tribunos-vociferantes relinquendum campum-mresta plebs seque­
retur. Consules, rel'icti a parte populi, per infrequentiam comitia nihilo seg­
nius perficiunt. Livy v11. 18. ' ·
 IlISTORY OF ROJ'IE. 449 •

Qf Coriolanus the patricians, seeing that the whole plebs was infu­
riated, sent their clients round to dissuade the individual plebeian~,
Qr to intimid:ite them 1309 : that after the banishment of Creso Quine,
tius they appeared in the forum with a great b~n<l of clients, at open
war with the plebs 1 ~: that, when Ap. Her<lonius hall seized the
Capitol, the tribunes wanted to hold a council of the plebs, telling
them that the occupiers of the citadel were not strangers, but allies
and. clie~ts of the patricians, let in to terrify the commonalty into
taking the oath of military allegiancett: and he explains the pur­
port of the Publilian law to have been, that, the tribunes being
appointed by the tribes, the patricians should altogether lose the
power of getting their partisans elected by the votes of the clients 19 •
To the same effect Dionysius tells us that., when the plebs had
deserted the city, the patricians and their clients took up arms 13 :
he says it was proposed to the senate during the secession of the
plebs, and again when the plebeians refused to serve, and again
was decreed on a like occasion, that the patricians, should march
out along with their clients, and with such plebeians as would join
them 14 : he extols the plebeians, because during the famine and
the dissensioi1s instead of plundering the granaries and the market

1309 11. 35. Infensa erat coorta plebs-Tentata res est, ~i, dispositis cli­
entibus, absterrendo singulos-disjicere rem possent. Universi deinde pro•
cessere-precibus plebem exposcentes.
10 m. 14. Instructi paratique (juniores patrum) cum ingenti clientium
exercitu sic tribunos, ubi primum ~ubmoventes causam prrebuere, adorti aunt,
etc.
11 m.16. Tantus tribunos furor tenuit, ut-contenderent patriciorum
hospites clientesque-(Capitolium insedisse) :-concilium inde legi perferen·
dre habere.
12 n. 56. Rogationem tulit-ut plebeii magistratus. tributis comitiis
'fierent-res-qure patriciis omnem potestatem per clientium suffragia creandi
quos vellent tribunos auferret.
13 vr. 47: 'Ap7l':t.11':t.V'1't; '1':t. 071'>.:t., ,,.;,, ,,..7,
oi,.tloi; ti<:t.<T'1'0l 7l't>.:t.'1':t.1;­
7l':t.p•~on 8011'. ,· ·
14 v1. G3: Aunl "'' X"'P"'f.<•V-i<:t.l T•u> 71'•>.:t.T:t.;;7l':t.n«c i7l':t.)'"'f"'Bot, ,..u
'1'0U JnµOTll<OU 'tO 7l'tpi6v. VII. 19: 'Ei< "'"'' 7l'<t'tp11<{1l!V ;e,>.onrtl 'tlVf> l<d.'tl•
i'P"~".,."'' a. µ11. Toi"; 71'•>-•mxic ""' ctu'tolc-0.,{)'oV "' d.71'0 ,,..11 Jnµou µipo> ,,..,.
0

t(T'Tpet7tuev. x. 15: AiFroVc icp11 rroU, 7l'd!Tp1x.fovr; · id.U'T(AJV tT<»µt1.rr1 x.ttl 'J"QIF
uu1611'Tt.tn1 ct.VTo'ir: 9TtAct'T(J)., 07r>..ltr!.Lµ~vour;, xa.l t;T, '4AAo ?rAM9oc iBsi>i.or./0"101 «ii·
'1'o1, <T11r«pwr11.1. x. 27: 'E"v µn .,,.,f9n't:t.I o Jiiµoc 'tov> '11'a.'l'p1 ..{ou; :,µ,,,<Tole
9Tthce.Tcur; x.~6o'7TAJ~ctµiyour;, T"'v T' a."'A'A{A}• ~ot..1rrwv 7r!.Lfd..A.ct~6vTr.1.r: o1r; M"v ix.oU­
.,.,., <T1JVt1,pa.<T8:t.1 'toli-a.j-QJVOC, x. 43. 'H ~011>.n ')-Vlllf.<HV a.?ttJtfZ:t.'1'0, 'tOu> 'lf':t.'I'•
put.lour:--fg1ll'tJ.l trUv rro"ir: E1utr(t)Y we>..et.TctJC', 'ta>Y ,r a."'AJ..(A)J sroJ..t'TCl>V trr/ic ~ou­
>-0µ,voic f""'xuv .,)j, <T'tf:t.Tei:t.e--00"111. 1Tv:t.1 '1':t. 1rp_o, 6106,,
I.-3 G .
450 IIISTORY OF ROME.

they ate grass and roots: and the patricians, because they did not
fall with their own forces and the great body of their clients on the
strengthless starving multitude, and slay them or drive them out of
the city 1815 ; and he relates, just as Livy does in one of the passages
quoted above, that the patricians appeared in the forum with their
clients, in order to prevent the cpuncil of the plebs from assembling,
or to disperse it by force 1 fl.
These express and numerous testimonies have been overlooked
on account cf a statement which is palpably erroneous. Yet surely
many must have been struck by them as perplexing; and without
doubt so were the historians themselves. But when they wrote
the only real division of the citizens was into the rich and the poor:
the needy, however noble their lineage might be, had to court a
protector ; and he that had his million, even though he were a
freedman, was courted as a protector. As to a ~elation of heredi­
tary dependence, they could hardly find any traces of such: their
readers, since the revival of philology, have known of nothing of·
the kind; and thus it was impossible for them to form any other
conception of tlie plebs, thnn that, as opposed to the nobility, it
was a body of town-citizens, among whom the nobles had adherents
and de];!endents under the name of clients,' a relation however
merely springing out of personal wants and terminating with them.
Nevertheless, though there was no contemporary example to
throw light on the obscurity of the ancient term, the descriptions of
the nature of the clientship might still have been sufficient to show
that the plebs, such as it appears in history, must essentially and
necessarily have been far removed from any relation of the kind.
'Vould not the maltreatment and oppression endured by the com­
monalty have been incredible in a state of clientship? when the
patrc~ was directed to protect his clients, and to promote their wel­

. 1315 vu. 18: T~ '1"' .ix.al~ tuv11.µu x.11.l it~ 71'11.p<L '1""'' ?ril..et'l""'V 71'0;>,.;>,.~ oiio-~.
In this story the estates appear mostly as the rich and poor, 71';>,.ouo-101 and
71'tYnTW owing to the historian's perverted notion of the demus: still he often
expressly mentions the patricians and the tnµo71x.01, witli tile tribunes at their
head.
16 IX. 41: Ka.S' h11.1pel11.c-,,."µ<1. '?"Ole i11.u'?"Q>Y 71'IAIJ.'1"<tlc, OVI< o;>,.l,,oic oio-1,
,,-o;>,.;>,.<t µipn 'l"'iic «/'•p11.c x.«'1"•7;tov. x. 40: A decree of the plebs is to be stopped
by force, o«r µti ,,-;16000-1 '?"OV ,J'Y,µov. The patricians are to come betimes into
the forum, d.'µ<1. '1"•7c h11.lposc '1"1 x.11.I 71't1'.1J.'1"11.1C, and to scatter themselves about
Ho as to separate. the tnµo'1"1x.6v. Now when o t'iiµoc <t71'il'1"11 1o~c -.}il<Pour­
t1lo-711.11S11.1 ~•uMµivoic u7<t <PU~<tC 7o'ic tnµ6711.1c <µ71'ot"'' t/'ivov7o. 41. To the
same effect is the proposition of M. Valerius in vu. 54.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 451
fare, even against his own nearest kin. Could the clients ever
have been in want of any other protection than that of their patrons?
could they have needed that of the tribunes against any· one what­
ever? And how could decrees have been passed in the assemblies,
as they were afterward, adverse to the interests of the patricians,
when these were the concern of every individual patron? Their
clients, if they had thus injured them, would have become outlaws.
The surprising thing is, not that the clients were a totally differ­
ent body from the plebeians; not that, as follows from what Livy
says about the consequences of the Publilian law, they were not
included in the tribes ; but rather his express testimony that they
had votes in the comitia of the centuries, even before the decem­
virate1317. But for this, we should look upon them as sojourners,
like those in Greece, destitute of all political rights; and who could
not even maintain their civil rights, except in the person of their
patron and sponsor: but there is no force in analogy, when opposed
to such a direct assertion. Only this certainly docs not compel us
to assume that all the clients were rerarian citizens, and that no
part of them were metics in the Greek sense; although I apprehend
that no mention of any such is to be found. · It is surely incredible
that Rome threw open even her lowest franchise so wide, that every
foreigner on attaching himself to a patron might acquire it: what
then would have been the advantage of the isopolites? and just as
little can we suppose that foreigners, before a prretor for them was
established 18 , could come into court in their own persons 10 • Such
foreigners settled at Rome were complete mctics; and I conjecture
that a part of the freedmen were in a similar condition. It looks
so very unlike the early ages, that there should have been two
forms for the selfsame purpose, and the distinction between them
might so easily be lost, that I cannot persuade ,myself that a slave

1317 Because the transfer of the election to the tribes was to destroy the
influence which the patricians exercised through the suffragia clicntium: see
note i312.
18 This measure was a political change of the highest importance.
What led to it was not the too great pressure of the prrntor's business,-to
which for example the institution of the vice-chancellor's office in England
has been owing,-but the alarm excited by the clients of the gTandees, with
whose patronage the members of the Italian confedG!acy might now dispense.
The patron who came forward was the mask without which the client was
not allowed to appear.
, 19 Hence, long aft.er the clientship in its genuine form had ceased to
exist, the person who came before the court in any particular case was called
patroruu.
452 IIISTORY OF ROME.
who was set free by the vindicta, gained the same degrne of free­
dom as one by the census 1320 • By being registered in the census the
Italians might a?:quire the franchise of citizens: but a person who
was to have the same power as they had of exercising this great
privilege, must surely have been free already: this, and no more,
I conceive, did the slave become by the vindicta: and even by the
census, before the censorship of Appius the Blind, he merely ob­
tained the rights of an rerarian 21 • In. both stages, as merely free
and as a Roman citizen, he was still a client of the master who had
released him : in the former he would only have the rights of a
me tic.
Freedmen and their posterity probably made up the largest part
of the clients; and among these the race of' the original ones, such
as they were in the time of Romulus, would in great part be merged.
Among the metics and rerarians were the artisans; and if a plebeian
gave up husbandry, he sank .to the franchise to which these were
confined. They too were not without the honour of having cor­
porations sanctioned by law; and their guilds were in such high
estimation that Numa was said to haYe been their founder. There
were nine of them; pipers, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, curriers,
tanners, coppersmiths, potters, and a ninth guild common to the
other trades 2 ~. This part of the state never received that full devel­
opment, which as the guilds were connected with the centuries by
means of the carpenters, the trumpeters, and the hornblowers, in the
same way as the patricians were by the six suJTragia, was no doubt
designed for it.
Those among them who were independent pale-burghers,-iso­
polites who had not bound themselves to any patron (if such a class
existed), and the descendants of clients whose ties had dropt off on
the house of their patrons becoming extinct-were unquestionably
as entire strangers to the ~issensions between the ancient burghers
and the commonalty, as the members of the Florentine guilds were
to the feuds among the houses of Guelphs and Ghibellines. As to
the clients, it is likely that the whole body were still subject to the
orders of the patricians.
1320 Both these rights are traced back to the oldest times, only it is by
personifications : the former to the release of the slave who disclosed the
conspiracy of the Tarquins; the latter to Servi us Tullius. This doubtless
was the sole reason why his memory was. especially venerated by slaves:
though that circumstance was made use of to confirm tlie fable of his birth,
and was referred to his name. ·
21 Plutarch Publicol. c. 7.
22 Plutarch Numa. c. 17. Again three times three.-How remarkable
is the co_ntrast with the ancient and great guilds at Florence!
THE SECESSION OF THE CO~IMONALTY,

AND THE TRIBUNES OF THE PEOPLE.

IN this divided state of the nation the preponderance of numbers

may not have been so entirely on the side of the plebeians, as will
probably be supposed by every one) even by such as have thoroughly
got rid of the delusive notion that the patricians of those ages are ta
be regarded as a noblesse; a class which in fact was to be found
within both the estates. Had the superiority of the plebeians been
so great as to leave no doubt that the issue of a contest with arms,
since matters had unhappily gone so far, would be in their favour,
they would never have contented themselves with a compact merely
giving them back a part of the rights they had been robbed of. And
yet the commonalty, if it stood together as one man, was evidently
so strong, that their opponents betrayed the uttermost infatuation,
when, instead of endeavouring to separate the various classes which
composed it, they on the contrary wronged and outraged them all
nt once; the noble and rich, by withholding public offices from them;
such of the gentry as without personal ambition were attached as
honest men to the well being of their class, by destroying its com­
mon rights and privileges; the personal honour of both, by the in­
dignities to which· such as stood nearest. to the ruling party were the
most frequently exposed, and by which men of good birth are the
most keenly wounded; every one who wanted to borrow money,
and all the indigent, by the abominable system of pledging the
person and of slavery .for debt; in fine high and low, by excluding
them from the public domains, where many, who had been stripped
of their property by the loss of the territory beyond the Tiber, might
have found a home. The Valerian laws may not have been re­
pealed; .the twenty tribunes, such as they then were, may have
had the right, when a person was condemned to servile corporal
punishments, of snatching him from. the gaoler, and bringing him
454 HISTORY OF ROME.
before the court of the commonalty, which, as it surely could not
assemble pellmell, they themselves were to summon: but woe to
him who durst do so against Appius Claudius !
When he and P. Servilius were consuls, in the year 259, a spark
set fire to the inflammable matter which had thus been accumulated.
An old man, who had escaped from his creditor's prison, in squalid
rags, pale and famishing, with haggard beard and hair, implored in
agony the help of the Quirites. A crowd gathered round him: he
showed them the bloody marks of his inhuman treatment: he told
them that, after he had fought in eight and twenty battles 1323 , his
house and farm-yard had been plundered and burned by the enemy;
the famine during the Etruscan war had compelled him to sell his
all 24 ; he had been forced to borrow ;· his debt through usury ha<l
run up to many times its original amount: whereupon his creditor
had obtained judgment against him and his two sons, and had laid
them in chains. Disfigured as his features were, many recognized
him to be a brave captain; compassion, indignation, spread an
uproar through the whole city: all who were pledged, and all who
had redeemed their pledges, flocked together; and all were clamor-.
ous for relief of the general distress.
The senate knew not how to act. · The people spurned at the
summons to enlist in the legions, which, with a view of diverting
the storm, were to be levied against the Volscians : these and the
Sabines are mentioned as the nations Rome was then at war with ;
for with the Eutruscans and Latins she was at peace. Compulsion
was impossible : but when P. Servilius issued a proclamation, that
none who was in slavery for debt, should be hindered if he were
willing to serve ; and that, so long as a soldier was under arms, his
children should remain at liberty untouched and in possession of
their father's property 25 ; then all who were pledged took the mili­
tary oath. After a few days the consul, at the head of a victorious
army; rich in glory and booty, the conqueror of the Volscians or
Auruncians and of the Sabines, marched back. to Rome. But the

1323 Dionysius vi. 26. This looks very like history; and yet is nothing
more than another way of dressing up what Dionysius says in the preceding
clause, that he had served all his campaigns. .See above p. 341.
24 I suspect that in the original representation he belonged to one of the
ten lost tribes. The whole story reminds us and is a mere repetition of the
one about the old soldier whom M. Manlius releases. Livy VI. 14.
25 This again seems to be nothing more or less than an adcount in a
historical form of the origin of the justitium, which most probably produced
this very effect.
 . IIISTORY OF ROME. 455

commonalty was bitterly deceived in its hopes that its oppression

might be alleviated.
A great deal was said in the Annals of the way in which Appius
Claudius from the beginning of the disturbances opposed every
measure of humane and wise forbearance, an<l throughout their
whole continuance persisted in the same obstinacy: probably this
came from the family commentaries of the Claudii, who, priding
themselves on their hatred of the people as the Valerii did on their
hereditary love of the people, pourtrayed their ancestor with the
characteristic features of their house; not that any historical accounts
of him ha<l been preserved. That house <luring the course of cen­
turies produced several very considerable, few great men; hardly,
clown to the time when it became extinct, a single noble minded
one : in all ages it distinguished itself alike by a spirit of haughty
defiance, by disdain for the laws, and by iron hardness of heart:
they were tyrants .. by nature, and now and then dangerous dema­
11:ogues : Tiberius was not more odious than the earlier Claudii.
Their character is visible in the story that such as had been .slaves
for debt were sent back to their prisons by Appius Claudius on their
return from the field, and that such as were pledged were consigned
by him without mercy to their creditors. But these sentences
could not be executed; for the pleb~ians were in open insurrection;
they protected all who wer~ condemned: and the usurers who had
obtained those detested judgments, the young patricians who in
their zeal were lending a helping hand to the officers of the court,
could hardly save themselves from their fury. Thus the year
passed away 18" 6•
The next year, when the military season arrived, the consuls,
A. Virginius and T. Vetusius, found it impossible to raise legions.
The commonalty, assembling by night and secretly in the quarters
inhabited exclusively by the plebeians, on the Aventine and the Es­
quiline, was immovable in its determination not to supply any soldiers;
and the intreaties for lenity which they had begun with, now grew
i.nto a demand that all debts should be cancelled. The ferment was

1326 During this consulship it is said that the temple of Mercury was
dedicated, an event connected with the institution of a guild of merchants;
and that on this occasion an inspector of the corn trade was first appointed by
the people: this magistracy was probably renewed every year, until the busi­
ness was transferred to the rediles, who at first had nothing to do with it. If
the election rested with the populus, as Livy tells us (n. 27), it is hard to
understand how n centurion, M. Lretorius, that is, a plebeian, should be the
first person who hel.d this office.
456 IIISTORY OF ROME.
so violent, that the more mildly disposed among the patricians
recommended the purchase of peace, even at this price : others
trusted it would subside on the restoration of their liberty and pro­
perty to those who in the hope of regaining them had marched the
year before against the enemy. Appius insisted on severity: the
beggars, he said, are still too well off; their insolence ought to be
quelled: a dictator will soon do it. His friends would have placed
him in this office: but the milder 132 7 party prevailed in the election:
and the measure by which i.ts proposer intended to dare every thing
and risk every thing, became the means of a reconciliation by the
appointment of Marcus Valerius 28 • Dy a proclamation like the
one Servilius had issued he engaged the plebeians to enlist: for
they trusted in the power of the dictatorship, and in the word of a
Valerius. Ten legions were raised 29 , and three armies sent, against
the Sabines, the ~quians, and the Volscians: every where the
Romans were favoured by victory, more rapid and more brilliant
than the senate ;vished it 30 • The dictator was rewarded with dis­
tinguished honoui·s, but not with the release of the debtors from
slavery, which, true to his word, he demanded. Thereupon he
laid down his office, the power of which would have been a dan­
gerous temptation to put down. the scandalous abuse of a formal
right with a strong hand: the plebeians themselves owned that he
could not do more to keep his faith, and full of gratitude conducted
him from the Forum to his house.
The dictator's army, of four legions, had been disbanded after his·

1327 The Harten and the Linden were the names of the parties in Appen­
zell during the last century.
28 Marcus he is called by Cicero, Zonaras, Livy; that is, by his manu­
scripts, in unison with Orosius: Manius by Dionysius and the Triumphal Fasti.
Yet even in Dionysius, who places the beginning of the dissensions some
years further back, tile Valerius who at that time is well affected toward the
poor, and who assuredly was meant for, the dictator, is named Marcus. v. 64.
1 have already explained the corruption, above p. 410, n. 1198, 1199. Sigo­
nius altered the text in Livy, supporting himself by the authority of those
who in earlier times had 'allowed themselves to garble the truth for the sake
of getting rid of contradictions: in this way Livy has been disfigured. Who­
ever does not distrust the completeness of the Fasti, must prefer Marcus,
were it oniy becl),use he had been consul: which no Manius had.
29 Here there is the most glaring exaggeration : at the Allia the Ro­
mans had only four regular legions. ·
30 In speaking of this war the two historians invert the usual proportion
between their narratives : the copious one in Livy infers that in the old rep­
resentations the exploits of the plebs, and consequently the unworthy conduct
Qf their rulers, were set in a prominent light
 HISTORY OF ROME. 457

triumph: but those of the consuls were still in the field 1381 : under
the pretext that a renewal of hostilities was impending, they were
commanded to remain under arms. Hereupon the insurrection
broke out. The army appointed L. Sicinius Bellutus its leader,
crossed the Anio, and occupied a strong camp on the Sacred Mount,
in the Crustumine district39 • The consuls and the patricians re­
turned to Rome without injury or insult.
Many of the narratives in the earliest history· of Rome betray
their fabulous nature by the contradictions and impossibilities they
involve: there are none such in the account of the first secession,
as given by Livy, and much more fully by Dionysius: nor can we
pronounce it to be quite impossible that a recollection of the various
parties which divided the senate, and of their spokesmen, should
be preserved; although unquestionably there were no traces of it
· in the oldest Annals. And yet the internal connexion here merely
proves the intelligence of the annalist who drew up the story now
adopted : as is clear from the irreconcilable contradictions between
it and other stories, which at one time were no less in vogue.
Cicero, who every where follows totally different Annals from

1331 Although the words of Dionysius--roic inra1roic t7TiTtt~• ,,..,;,,.,. i..6t1r

'l'tt.rrTpttTtiff<<LT<t: v1, 45-ileem distinctly to express as much, yet elsewhere
he follows an account by which the insurgents were only one of the con­
sular armies. Thi11 in those days is said to have contained three legions:
and when the tribune Brutus asserts that the emigrants were more than
thrice as numerous as the Alban colony of Romulus (vi. 80), this is be­
cause every legion at the time, the tribes being twenty, had five cohorts and
3000 men, which is the number assigned to the Romulean colony: and Dio­
nysius fancied that the seceders had been strengthened by new-corners from
the .city. So that in the pa~sage-'T<»V i'"P i1p01r TIJ.)'f'"T<»V h1 '"'P"' ~. (n
fowi..•) VI. 45-which is certainly corrupt, we ought probably to substitute
'l'p1<»•· Livy's account too, that the dictator brought forward his proposition in
the senate after the return of the consul Vetusius, implies that only the three
legions of the other consul were still in the field. It is true that on another
occasion Dionysius imagined there were six legions: for this is all he means,
when he makes Appius say that the emigrants were not so much as a seventh
part of the 130,000 Romans in the census (v1. 63); in other words, did not
amount to 18,600. That is to say, six legions on the above mentioned scale
consist of 18,000 foot-soldiers: the cavalry, according to the views taken by
Dionysius, are entirely left out of the account. This statement for a long
time rather dazzled than deceived me by its delusive historical look: it is
worth while to observe how this too, when critically examined, disappears .
.32 Hence this secession was also called the Crustwnerine. Varro de
L. L. 1v. 14. p. 24. The Sacred Mount had its name from being consecrated
to Jupiter by the plebeians when they were leaving their camp. Festus v.
Sacer Mons. Cicero Fragm. pro Corn. ·
l.-3 11
 458 HISTORY OF ROME.
Livy, speaks of the negotiation of the dictator M. Valerius with
the seceders, as of an undoubted fact; and attributes the glory of
having effected the peace to him: for which reason, and not for
any victories, the surname of Maximus and the most splendid hon­
ours had been bestowed on him 1333 • A fragment of the same story
is discernible in what Livy himself mentions in a passage far re­
moved from the history of these times; namely, that the nail was
once driven in by a dictator during the secession of the commonal­
ty34: for at the second secession no dictator could be appointed. The
variations as· to the number and names of the first tribunes of the
people will be noticed further down. Lastly all the Annals were
not agreed even on the point that the army took its station quietly
on the Sacred Mount, and obtained its end without violence. Piso,
as Livy tells us, wrote that the plebs occupied the Aventine: Cicero
says, first the Sacred Mount, then the Aventine 35 : so does Sal­
lust38: and when Cicero makes the enemy of the tribunate assert
that it originated during a civil war, while the strong posts of the
city were seized and held by armed men 8 7, he refers to the same
story. Piso himself perhaps did not deny the encampment on the
Sacred Mount. Indeed it is utterly inconceivable that the com­
monalty should not have placed some troops to maintain its strong
quarters· in the city; as else the women and the helpless must have
fled, or would have been seized as hostages: nor is it improbable
that their doing so gave rise to the story of the meetings on the
Aventine and the Esquiline before the insurrection. To these hills
then such plebeian3 as dwelt scattered about the city retreated:· on
the Sacred :Mount the legions encamped, and may have been joined
by volunteers from the country round : here were the leaders, and
here the treaty was negotiated.
Nor would the patricians have been able to keep this army out
of the city, where the gates of the plebeian hills stood open to it:

1333 Brutus. 14 (54). Videmus-cum plebes-montem, qui Sacer appel­

latus est, occupavisset, M. Valerium dictatorem dicendo sedavisse discordias
etc.
34 vm. 18. Memoria-repetita, in secessionibus quondam plebis cla­
vum ab dictatore fix um. This seems to be founded on the historical fact that
the consular year expired before the election of the new magistrates, and that
Valerius was dictator in the middle of Septemher.
35 De Re p. 11. 33.
. 36 Fragm. Hist. 1. p. !)35. Plebes-armata montem Sacrum atque
Aventinum insedit.
37 De Legib. 111. 8 (lD.) In~r arma civium, et oecupatis et obsessis
urbis locis procreatum.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 459

but every one of the seven was a for.t 1338 ; an<l thus the Palatine,
Quirinal, and Crelian were no less <lefcnsible than the Capitol.
These then were occupied by arme<l men, just as the Aventine was
by the opposite party· an<l matters might have come, even•without
reaching the same pitch of violence .as at Florence, to battles in the
heart of the city; in the Forum, the Ve!abrum, the Subura. As
the plebeians were far from being that common populace which
makes up much the largest part of the inhabitants of most towns,
so Rome too was far from empty: on the contrary thousands beyond
doubt had come in from the country, where we cannot suppose
that the patricians and their clients would be able to maintain their
ground.,
That the patrician houses coul<l muster ·thousands capable of
bearing arms, may be inferred from the example of the great Ger­
man and Italian cities, out of which the burghers could send fifteen
hundred cavaliers, and m~re, completely arme<l into the fiel<l. The
descendants of those who· at one time formed the whole Roman
nation, must still have been a larg-e body: and the general fact that
the members of the houses were very numerous, is one on which
such tradit~ons as give any statements bearing upon it speak Clearly
enough. Not that I would consider it as a historical assertion, that
the Potitii about the year 440 counted twelve families and thirty
grown up men'*; numbers of this sort occ11rring in the narratives
from the priestly books are just as much matter of form as the
well-known names in the law books: and as to the three hundred
Fabii, they stand on no surer ground than the three hundred thou­
sand barbarians under l\lardonius: or their wives and children are
included. Still less will the story of their four thousand clients,
and the five .thousand of the Claudian house, authorise us to draw
any histori~al conclusion as to the number of dependents the patri­
cians had under their or<lers. Yet a general acquaintance with the
state of things might enable the annalists to relate without danger
of error, though without any definite traditions, that the patricians
and their clients took up arms immediately after the secession, and
that the headstrong adversaries of peace were so utterly infatuated
as to dream that they were powerful enough to conten<l at once
with. the commonalty and with foreign enemies 39 • But with the

1338 Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces. Dionysius often speaks
of the strong posts in the city, '1'11. apuf<V<L .,.;;, 9J"DM.,r.
* Livy xx. 2lJ. ·
39 Two of the leading passages from Diony•ius-vJ. 47 and 63-ha.ve
been inserted above in notes 1313, 1314.
460 HISTORY OF ROME.
same correctness they added, that the clients were artisans and
tradesmen 1340 ; a multitude which sent no soldiers to the legions, and
which, being unused to arms, could not make head in the field
against a peasantry inured to war.
This partition of its forces saved Rome. There was no ground
for dreading a massacre like that at Corcyra ; for the nation was
not split into a few hundred rich men of rank on the one side, and
thousands of proletarians standing in direct opposition to them,
whose victory could not have been doubtful for an instant when
once they should rebel. If hunger did not reduce the patricians,
the attempt to force their quarters would have cost torrents of
blood, and the result must at least have been uncertain: the victors
too, standing amid the ruins, between two conquering nations, the
Etruscans and the Volscians, would not long have had to exult in their
unblest triumph. If the quarrel however had been prolonged
after the appeal to arms, the patricians, po>:sessing the incalculable
advantage of being the government, would perhaps have had time
and means to sow divisionamong their opponents, and certainly
to strengthen themselves by alliances. The annalist, from wl10m
Dionysius took the advice he put into the speech of Appius, that
instead of the insurgents the citizens of the colonies should be in·
vited to receive the rights of the plebeians 41 , and that the isopolite
franchise should be conferred on the Latins, had formed an admi·
rable conception of the ancient state of things, or had weighed the
laws and documents preserved from that time with a perfect know­
ledge of their spirit. The explanation of the Latin confederacy
must be postponed to the next volume, in order that the bulk of
the present may not swell out of all proportion: however, this be·
ing necessary, I will here introduce the remark, that the treaty with
the Latins, which recognised their equality as a state, was made in
the year of the secession: and if an inference from the end to the
means be any where allowable, there cannot be a question that it
was aimed against the plebs, and that the conclusion of peace was
decided by it*.
Livy's good sense taught him that this distracte~ state of the na·

1340 eii.,.ac, ,.,.) 'lrt>.c0T<t1, ,.,.) ;tupJv«xTte. Dionysius VI. 51. The vul­
gus forense-opificum-sellulariorum.
41 VI. 63. Toil, ix 71111 <ppoupl1111 µtT«'lrtp.,,.,;,µ19«, ,.,.) 7otl, ir 7«i,
.;.,,..,,.;,," iv«x«hfYJµo. These ii.re the Romulean colonies which had the Cre­
rite franchise : the colonists, that is, those of the .ruling tribe, he calls <1>poup:&:
u. 53. See also vn. 53.
* See the text to note 20, Vol. n.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 461

tion cannot have lasted many days: the Volscians and .£quians
would not have been motionless spectators, waiting to take up arms
or to sustain an attack until the Romans were reconciled and ready
for war. The notion of Dionysius that four months passed in this
way, may be easily shown to rest on a deduction which is good for
nothing1 340 • I do not indeed set much value on the story that the
seceders neither destroyed nor ravaged any thing on the estates of
their enemies, and merely took the bread necessary for their susle•
nance : it belongs to the legends of the marvels wrought of yore by
virtues no longer to be found: but when extended to such a period
it becomes a monstrous exaggeration. If howevE>r the open war
belween the two estates was but short, it is conceivable that the
commanders had wisdom and influence enough to restrain their fol­

lowers from acts of violence, which would have obstructed a recon­

ciliation;

The election of the new consuls was carried on by the populus:

because the centuries, in the absence of the commonalty, could not
be assembled. , The right of a free choice among the candidates
for the office had only been secured by the Valerian law to the
regular comitia ; the curies were restricted to voting on resolutions
of the ~enate: and from the same reasons for which none but con- ­
sulars were to be eligible to the dictatorship, those who were pro­
posed on this occa<:ion were men who having before been freely
elected had borne the consulate with honour 1843 • But though the
design even then without doubt was to maintain this advantage, the
. legal mode of election must have been re-established after the peace;
and it was not till several years after that under more favourable
circumstances a more decided attempt at this usurpation could be
hazarded, when for a time it was successful.
1342 It was assumed that the first tribunes were clwsen on the twelfth of
December (Dionysius VI. 80), which however can only have been the day of
election at the restoration of the office ailer the decemvirate, and thencefor­
ward. This was combined with the breaking out of the insurrection under
the consulship of Virginius and Vetusius, and also, it may be conjectured,
with the dictatorship of M. Valerius on the ides of September.
43 Dionysius VI._ 49. 'o ,, ,.,...,, '7r11J'il 11'apli1 0 xpor•• •., ,; "'"'
rif X"' i:>r1.,upoiir (auctores ficri) Utt, O'ure;..Bon•• ti, ,,.cl ?rtJ'1or (this is his
usual error by which to the comitia of the plebs .in the forurq he opposes
those of the centuries in the campus as an aristocra.tical assembly, instead of
the council of the curies), oiiJ'tro• ou'Tt "'"''""'•' .. ~, ~,,..,.,,;.,,, ouTe J'1J'o,,.<rn
,.;,..oµhorii-Gc A«.~1"ir, «~T<Jc ti1l'Gi.lxrrnr" ~W&'fouc fx. TotV ~J'J tb.11,0'Ta.r ... ~.
dp:tilr 'T<trl•rnr. In ID}' account I have translated this back again into that
which Dionysius read without understanding it, and which was an unequivo­
cal tradition from extremely accurate and authentic notices. ·
 462 HISTORY OF ROME.
Thus much may be considered as historical, that. the proposal
for an arrangement procee<led from the patricians. Their great
council1 3 a empowered the senate to nPgotiate ; and the latter sent
the ten chiefs• 5 of its bo<ly on an embassy to the commonalty as to
a victorious foe. The compact between the two estates-for the
ambiguous word patres must here be referred, as it must generally
in Livy's earlier books, to the patricians, not to the senate-was
confirmed by a solemn treaty concluded by the fecials over the
body of a victim ; and all the Rornans swore to observe it.
The ·terms of this act are very different from what one should
look for, when the state of affairs was such, that the destruction of
the patricians, although it would certainly have entailed that of the
state, still appeared to be the more probable issue of the civil war.
Being reduced to choose between present sacrifices to be made by
individuals, and permanent ones by the order, the leaders of the
senate decided with signal aristocratical wisdom: and as they had
contrived to gain the Latins by entering into a confederacy with
them, with like policy they detached ,the cause of the multitude
from the interests of the men of rank in the second estate, who,
when deserted by the lower orders, becamp powerless. The plebs
neither gained the consulate, nor any other honours•e: the rights

1344 This assembly-the mention of which shows how carefully the An­
nals here copied the books of the augurs and pontiffs in representing the
whole procedure according to the forms of the constitution-reduces Dionysius
(v1. 67) to great straits; because he cannot concpive any ecclesia except that
of the demus. It was the assembly however which by the original constitu­
tion had to decide in questions of peace and war (vi. 66), consequently that
of the curies. How indeed should the senate have had the power of surren­
dering the rights of the estate by its own authority? To suppose that it was
a plebeian assembly is altogether absurd, as in fact the sagacious writer very
clearly perceives. Nor can it even be the mixed one of the centuries; for this
could only collect on the field of Mars, whereas here the Vulcanal ('ro itpor
'tou 'Hq>ottuTov) is expressly mentioned as the place of meeting. That temple
lay above the Comitium (the passages to prove this are collected by Nardini,
1. p. 272; who however mistakes the Comitium and its locality) on the lower
edge of the Palatine, and was considered a part of the Comitium, the very
place where the patricians held their assemblies. Seep. 413, note 1205.
45 The list of their names in Dionysius (v1. 69) is very probably au­
thentic: and that these ten were.. the deum primi is proved by the words just
before, oi t1Tlq>a.vtuT<t.'To1 'T,.V 7rp•u~u'Tepoev, that is, of the gentes majores, and by
the passage quoted above in note 784. Ev!m though they were not clearly
aware of this, the editors ought not to have filled up the list by inserting the
name of Sp. Nautius, of whom Dionysius had just said expressly that he was
the first among the 1to1.
46 Were there not reason to 1mspect that every story, which redounds
 Hl8TORY 01.<' ROME. 403

of the patricians were not altered ; all ihat was done was to give
force to the Valerian laws. On the other hand, although Livy says
nothing of any stipulations in behalf of the debtors, yet, as their dis­
tress was the source of the commotion, and the insurgents could
not yield on this point without abandoning themselves, we cannot
hesitate to believe the account in Dionysius, that all the contracts
·Of the insolvent debtors were cancelled, and that all who had in­
curred slavery by forfeiting their pledges or not paying their fines,
recovered their freedom 134 7,
But here too the sacrifice made was only for tlie moment; for .
the patricians managed to prevent any change in the law of debt.
Without doubt its abolition was demanded: and if Agrippa's pur­
pose was to convince the plebeians that they themselves could not
dispense with money dealings, nor consequently with severe laws
to protect them, we discern the bearings of his fable, which cannot
possibly be made applicable to the political stale of things. The
belly was the type of the capitalists*: in their capacity of govern­
ors the patricians would have been entitled to a less ignoble
symbol. •
With regard to the cancelling the debts Cicero pronounces, that
there was certainly some reason in the measures taken by states­
men of old to relieve the general distress brought on by the excess­
ive pressure of debts, as had been done even by Solon, and several
times by the Romans 48 • Ten years after indeed he thought
otherwise, and peremptorily condemned all such violent extremi­
ties4o: for in the interval he had been the witness of ruinous acts

to the honour of a Valerius, is apocryphal and derived from Antias, it might

look as if the admission of four hundred rich plebeians into the equestrian
order, attributed to the dictator M. Valerius (Dionysius vi. 44), ought to be
referred to the treaty between the estates; and to be regarded as a politic
device for separating the leading plebeian notables from the rest of their
order.
1347 Dionysius VI. 83. What is found in Zonaras, vu. 14, amounts to
the same thing; and they are supported by Cicero's whole view of these
events, as to the necessity of violating the letter of the law. De Re p. n. 34.
* This is the way Dion seems to have understood it. Too7m 1o'i>
,..Oi'o" 70 ?rhH'Boc O'"t1vH1uv, 6ic' r.i.i 711lY einr0pf.lv oiurf~.tJ &~I 101c ?TQVH'1'JV. ticdr tic
.;.qi1Mi:tv, ,..,) ti l<ti1wvo1 riqis;.oiv1o £,. l<tVi10'p.tt1,,,v, ou" •i> P.>.ttP•• 1o'ii1o 7,,,,
71"0>.Mor .;.,,..pttlvtt, .;, ,; -r• ,,.~ ix,om oi 71">.ou1ovv1•>, Gut.' oi .,,.;,.7,, ,;, ;,
""'Poi> .i.v"''i'":t{;,, ttourJ'I 1ou, ttt11i..ov7<t>, ""'l .. d71"o>.oliv7:1.1. Zonaras vu. 14.
48 Several times unquestionably; and in Cicero's youth by the law of
L. Valerius Flaccus, a patrician~ So greatly were circumstances changed.
49 De Offic. 11. 2'.2.
46( HISTORY OF ROME.

of arbitrary power, committed by the victorious party wl10m he

abhorred. This question is one of those on which assuredly no
inconsistency is betrayed by a change of opinion in consequence of
·fresh experience and under a different state of things. If a person
approves of Sully's rliminishing the interest payable to the public
creditors, who were swallowing up the revenues of the state, and
of hif! deducting the usurious proiits they had long enjoyed from
the principal; if he is aware how .lowering the interest, or the
capital of its debt, or the standard of its currency, has been the only
means whereby more than one state has been able to save itself
from the condition in which the whole produce of the ground and
of labour would have fallen into the hands of the fundholders 1350 ; if
.he knows how speedily and easily such wounds as this class sus­
tain in their property heal ; if he considers this, when reviewing
the history of the states of antiquity, whieh were drained by pri­
vate usury, he will be favourable to measures which tend to pre­
serve hereditary property and personal freedom, as Solon was. As
to any assignment of the public domains to the plebeians having
been agreed to, it is exceedingly improbable'!·
Whatever may have been done for the debtors, all traces of it
had vanished within a few years: for the good effected was soon
done away with, Rome for a long time being visited by misfortune
after misfortune. But the measures taken to compose the internal
dissensions gave birth to an institution, of a nature wholly peculiar,
dangerous only as great intellectual powers and animal spirits are
dangerous, which spread the majesty and the empire of the Roman
people, and preserved the republic from revolutions and from
tyranny; I mean the tribunate.
Little as the earl of Leicester foreboded, when he summoned
the deputies of the knights and commons to the parliament of the

1350 So that a bankruptcy must still have taken place in the end. A state
which sacrifices its tax-paye.rs to the public creditors, may be said propter
vitam vivendi perdere causas. Hume and Burke have declared that this idol­
atry of the national debt is worshipping Moloch.
Happy the times when one cannot have to talk of such extreme cures, the
produce of all property and of labour having increased in the same, nay in a
greater, pi:oportion than the demands of the state, and when the fimdholder
is rather conducive to its prosperity! But such times are .a. bounteous gift of
fortune, which will hardly be enjoyed again for many ages in the same way
as it was enjoyed by Germany before the thirt,Y years war and befqre the
revolution.
51 In Dionysius (v1. 44) M. Valerius 11ays be hii.d e~cited the indigm:i.­
tion of the patricians by a measure of this kind. See now 13'16.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 465
...
barons, that this was the beginning of an assembly which was at
one time virtually to possess the supreme authority in th~ king­
dom; just as little did the plebeians on the Sacred Mount foresee,
when th,.ey obtained the inviolability of their magistrates, that the
tribunate would raise itself by degrees to a preponderating, and
then to an unlimited power in the republic, and that the possession
of it would be sufficient, nay in point of form would be indispensa­
ble, to lay the foundation of monarchal supremacy: Its sole pur­
pose was to afford protection against any abuse of the consul's
authoritytssg; to uphold the Valerian laws, which promised the ple­
beians that their life and person should be secure against arbitrary
force. The only innovation consisted in making the tribunes in~
violable: which induces us to suspect that, when the tribunes
before this time came forward in behalf of such as were maltreated,
they had themselves lost their lives or suffered insult: and hence
we might.wonder that this Clause should have been of any avail.
It became so, because an offender, however powerful, was outlawed
by it, so that no one who should kill him could under any pretext
be brought to trial for such an act; and the criminal's house was
forfeit to the temple of Ceres 53 • From the nature of his office as a
public guardian, the tribune's house was kept open night and day
for all who called to him for succour; and this he had the power
of bestowing against every one, whosoever it might· be; against
violence and wro~g done by a private individual, and against a ma­
gistrate.
That the tribunes of the several tribes must already have had
the right of bringing propositions each before his own tribe, is a
matter of course; and supposing that, whether by election or tacit
agreement, one out of every ten was chosen to preside over the
whole order, these'officers, though not yet inviolable, must needs
have been entitled to bring similar propositions before the general
assembly of the commonalty. Here again however it is me{\tioned
on a specific occasion as a step gained by the rights of the com­
monalty, that soon after the treaty between the estates th_e plebs
enacted terrible punishments for securing the privilege of the tri­
bunes to lay propositions before them. If any one impeded and
interrupted a tribune who was addressing the plebeian assembly,
he was to give bail to the college of tribunes for the payment of

1352 Auxilii latio adversus consules: Livy. BoiiBu.-: Dionysius.

53 Dionysius v1. 89. The formulary in Livy, m. 55, by which the head
of the criminal is devoted to Jupiter, belongs no doubt, as he represents it, to
the period after the decemvirat"e. · ·
J.-3 I
 456 HISTORY OF ROME.

whatever mulct they should affix to his offence in arraigning him

before the commonalty: if he did not, his life and property were
to be forfeit 1354 , This law is represented by Dionysius as a mere
decree of the plebs; but its nature is such that it could not have
been passed without the agreement of the other· estate.
It was a controverted point even among the ancients, whether the
tribunate was a magistracy? They who would not allow any office
to be so, unless its authority extended over the whole nation, denied
it; and with justice, so far as relates to the earlier ages; but with
regard to the later they stickled about an empty shadow. In the
seventh century of the city the tribunes were to the fullest extent a
national magistracy; during the first two centuries of their existence
they were no less decidely a mere plebeian magistracy: but a ma­
gistracy they were incontestably: only their province was neither
government nor administration. In their most essential character
they were representatives of the commonalty; and as such, protec­
tors of the liberties of their order against the supreme power, not
partakers in that power: as such too, not empowered to impose a
mulct, but only to propose its imposition to the commonaltyss.
Neither were they judges between a consul and the person he had
sentenced to corporal punishment; but only mediators, in order
that the plebeian court might assemble without obstruction, and that
meanwhile the appellant might remain at liberty harmless •.. They
were the senses of their order; bringing before it what they perceived,
for its consideration and decision; and till it decided they prevented
any irrevocable act.
In this manner they interposed whenever the liberties of the ple­
beians were infringed. The determining on war and peace, so long
as the earliest state of things continued, rested with the curies, after
the preliminary deliberation of ·the senate. But when the com­
monalty was recognised as a free half of the nation, and furnished
the whole infantry of the army, there were no laws to which its
consent should have been more indispensable than to those by which
war was declared. This however was. the very point the patriciaris
were the most anxious to evade bringing before the cen"turies; and
naturally so: for, as the plebeians were excluded from sharing in
the profits of war:-from sharing in the conquered territory always,
and not unfrequently in the booty, when it was sold and the produce

1354 Dionysius vu.17. I shall show in the proper place that he carries
this ordinance much too far back: but"this is no reason for looking upon it as
apocryphal. · '
' 55 They were not able multam dicere, but only irrogare.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 467

went into the chest of the patricians-they were little disposed to sa­
crifice their lives or their blood. Now in this·case the assent of the
tribunes, either express or silent, served as a substitute for that of
their ordr.r, and 'Yas a way of maintaining its rights: on the other
hand a r~fusal to serve derived strength from their prohibition; since
none could seize the plebeian whom li. tribune protected, withoui
laying hands on his inviolable person. All this ceased when the
rights of the commonalty were established. In like manner the veto
was often needed to rescue a person from the levy, who had only
been taken for the sake of venting some private grudge against him,
when beyond the mile of the civic liberties, where the consul's au­
thority became unlimited. .
It often happened that the preventive power of the tribunes was
insufficient to hinder such acts of tyranny; or even to preserve the
solemn treaty from direct infringement. In such cases it was ne­
cessary that they should be able either to take the law into their
own hands or to demand its execution: by the original spirit of their
office they could only do the latter. We should expect to find that
this demand was to be made before a mixed jury under a foreman:
but the compact had been ratified by oath, under the form of a treaty
between the two estates; and, by a universal principle of Italian
international law, a people that had been injured either collectively
or in the person of one of its members, had the right of trying the
foreigner whom it charged with such an offence: and if any treaty
with his countrymen existed, they were bound. to deliver him up
for that purpose. They themselves were not competent to try him:
for indulgence would have been more than pardonable in a state of
manners which under many relations, such as that among the mem­
bers of the same gens and that between a patron and his clients,
made it an imperative duty not to condemn even the guilty; in a
state of manners akin to that where compurgation was obligatory:
but the judges being sworn, it was expected that, if their enemy
were proved innocent, they would acquit him. Whether this belief
did not rest on an innocent dream, and lead to acts of injustice, is
another question: but on these grounds the tribunes had the right
of arraigning consuls and other patricians before the commonalty.
The existence of this right implies that the patricians had the same
against any plebeians who were chargeable with a like offence
against their order. .
That the consuls after the expiration of their magistracy should
have been amenable to the commonalty for misdemeanours against
the whole republic, would be so at variance with all the relations
468 HISTORY OF ROME.
unequivocally apparent in these ages, that, if the instances (lf charges
preferred by tribunes on account of such misdemeanours during the
third century could in other respects be regarded as historical, we
should have to seek for a different explanation of them. According
to the spirit of the constitution in those days the curies were the
only judges in all that concerned the administration of the republic:
and so the tribunes must have had the rights of coming before them
as accusers, if the qumstors failed in th~ir duty.
The tribes were first made a branch of the legislature by the
Publilian law. Until then they could only 'pass re!'olutions, as
every other corporation can, which merely bound their own body.
On this as on oth!-Jr points Sylla, when he took away the right of
proposing laws from the tribunes, was unquestionably restoring
the letter of the constitution out of an age whch had passed away,
and which he every where aimed to revive.
That the number of tribunes at the first was only two, all the ac­
counts in effect agree 1806 : a~ to their names they differ: C. Licinius
and L. Albinius however seem to be pretty certain 57. , Though Si­
cinius had been chosen commander, he was not one of the first,
but only added to them afterward: this seems distinctly to favour
the conjecture that at the time of the secession the former were
already invested with the office, which as then was still insignifi­
cant; whereas Sicinius was selected to lead the army as the fittest
person in case the affair ended in war. 'With regard to the subse­
quent changes in the number we find divers accounts. According
to Piso there were but two down to the Publilian law U. C. 283 5 ":
according to Cicero they continued to be two for the first year, and
the next the npmber of the college was raised to ten~a: according
to Livy the two original ones presided at the election of three
others, of whom Sicinius was one. 'What discrepancies are these!
Cicero's statement, so far as it is at variance with the account that

1356 Even Dionysius, v1. 89, who first names two, and then proceeds,,
h 1 J't 1rpo' -rou-r•"· Livy is quite express on this point: so are Cicero pro
Corn., and de Rep. 11. 34; Tuditanus and Atticus in Asconius on the Corne­
Iiana; Lydus de Magist. 1. 38. 44; Zonoras vu. 15.
57 These are named ,by Livy and by Lydus 1. 44: the latter in these '
statements always follows Gaius, that is mediately, Gracchanus. In Asco­
nius indeed we find Sicinius instead of Licinius; and the surname proves that
it is not an error of the scribe: but L. Junius is a mistaken alteration made by
Manutius: the Laurentian MS, LIV. 27, has Lactinius; which confirms L. Al­
binius. L. Albinius, de plebe Romana homo, leads the Vestals to'Crere: Livy
v. 40. The fictitious L. Junius Brutus appears nowhere except in Dionysius.
58 Livy 11. 58. 59 Cicero Fragm. Corne!.
 HISTORY OF ROME.• '4G!J

the number was not raised to ten till six and thirty years after the
institution of the tribunate, may be regarded as certainly wrong:
besides it is surely in the highest degree improbable that the Pub­
lilian law should have introduced a number containing a direct re­
ference to the centuries, from which it took away the election; and
should have done away with one bearing a proportion to the num­
ber of the tribes, to which it transferred the election. For the fi,•e
tribunes were chosen one from each class 1360 , as two were from each
after the nm~ber was doubled61 : a relation which cannot possibly
have continued, when the constitution of the centuries had under­
gone a thorough change.
Officers who were the representives of the sev~ral classes, must
needs have been chosen by each severally: nor can we suppose
that they ·should have been so by a majority of the centuries taken
collectively. This was an approach to that equality which must
have prevailed in the assembly of the tribes: except that the ple­
hei.an knights were excluded 69 , as well as the locupletes below the
fifth class: for the proletarians, it is' probable, were not originally ad­
mitted to vote even in their tribes. A far more important restriction
lay in the dependence of the centuries upon the auguries, and in
the right of the clients to vote in them: but one beyond all compare
more momentous was, that at first the tribune elect was to be ap­
proved of by the patricians in the curies 63 • In a negotiation con­
ducted with address this concession might. be gained under the spe­
cious colour of its being for the good of the plebs itself that its offi- ·
cers should not be personally offensive to the first estate: it might
also be suggested that it was more dignified to have the same mode
of election as that by which curule offices were filled; although the
law concerning the imperium of a magistrate, which he himself
proposed to the curies, was something very different from this ac­
ceptance: and as the curies had t~ accept, they might also reject64 •

13GO Quinque creatos esse, singulos ex singulis classibus. Asconius on

the .Corneliana. See above p. 346.
131 Decem creati sunt, bini ex singulis classibus. Livy m. 30.
62 On this point again we see how artfully the patricians endeavoured
to divide their opponents: here however on the whole their efforts were vain.
63 Dionysius v1. 90: after the election by the plebeians, <rouc 'lr«'<p•xiou'
.,,.,;_,..,,..., t7r1xupt•><T«I TMV "-p;)v {ii<pov i7rnt:i.un«c. And after the Publilian
law the consuls reproach the tribunes:.;;,... ,..j 'l>P""f:tl 'TMV ..j.ii<pov u7rip Uf'-llJP
in-1<1><ponir. x. 4. See above note 849. ·
64 It is a remarkable instance of what may be effected by public opin­
ion and by the dread of it1 .to find that all the influence of the clicntry, and of
 470 HISTORY OF RO.ME.

That their share in the election was confined to this, is placed be­
yol}d a question by the passages just quoted from Dionysius 1 sas,
although it has been misinterpreted into an elec,tion at their comitia,
and that too by the ancients, by
Dionysius himself, and even by Ci­
cero66. The former however, as he was led in other places by the
well-informed writers he followed to see the matter in its true light,
felt perplexed; because he had a suspicion, even if he did not find
it distinctly stated, that the plebs was not comprised in the curies;
and he therefore distributes it amongst them 67 for the purpose of
this election. If we reflect how very easily the election and the
confirmation might be confounded, we shall loo:~ on those passages
as decisive, in which Dionysius takes a clear view of the subject,
and which are in perfect harmony with the whole system of the
ancient constitution. That the commonalty should have entrusted
the choice of its representives to the patricians is an absolute im­
po8sibility: .the unanimity among the plebeians however may easily
have been 'so great, that, as tribunes were at all events to be ap­
pointed, the right of refusing to confirm their election may have
availed the patricians but little. Nor, if one solitary creature of
theirs was thrust in by the votes of the clients, was this material,
so long as questions within the college were decided by the ag,ree­
ment of the majority among themselves: and the contrary practice
was not introduced till after the decemvirate and the revival of the
abolished office. The a~thors of the ancient books, who ascribed this
innovation to the most virulent of all the patricians, Appius Clau·
dius 68 , were mistaken about the date of this change in the constitu­
0

tion; but they were aware of its incalculable importance: the

tribunes, from being representatives of the commonalty and merely
authorised to report to it, were by this measure converted into
magistrates each individually wielding a power of his own.
personal intiigues, was not able to prevent the. election of the most eminent
men, who faithfully discharged their duties to their order, , '
1365 If this historian, who is so precise in his expressions, had meant to
say, tlie curies do not elect you-and not, they do not vote about you after your
election-he would have said, VfMM oiJ ;i:,t1po.,.ovoiir1'"·
/ 66 Dionysius v1: 8!). N•,unS•l, o JM,U•' ei, 'tit' .,.,;.,., oilr!'it' </Jpit'tpi"",
~ o?r"'' {6ov>.n·:U "" itu'tit' ,.,.po'1'1t')'•p•vsv-.;vp;i:,ov"1t' (that is, Jn,uitp;>:,ov')
J.mJwi.vvoun x. 41. Publilius ,U•'tit'}'ooY (the elections) £,. 7Mc </Jpit7ptitx'ii,
4•<P•1>•plit,, ilv oi 'Poo,ua:;., xoupt<t.7n1 xitMUrl'IV, t?rl 1hv </JU>.e111d1. Cicero Fragm.
Com, Itaque auspicato postero anno x tribuni pl. comitiis curiatis creati sunt.
67, vi. 89: quoted in the preceding note: The expression 7it' 7671 oil"'it'
is very remarkable.
68 Livy 11. 44. 1v. 48. In the former of these cases the matter is decided
by the majority, four against one.
 IUSTORY OF ROME. 471

As a corporate body the CO!llmonalty, beside its representatives,

required certain peculiar and local magistrates. Such were the
rediles, whose office is said to have been instituted after the treaty
of the Sacred Mount; and, like that of the tribunes, may probably
have been older.. The nature of their duties in early ages is very
uncertain: they are represented a;; having been immediately subor­
dinate to the tribunes, and as having been judges in such causes as
they were appointed to decide by these their superiorsl 369, That
they exercised a kind of police is unquestionable: the inspecting
the markets however is said not to have been assigned to them till
later7°: at all events their power must have been confined to their
own order. The temple of Ceres was under their peculiar guar­
dianship ; where no doubt they from the first kept the a~chives of
the commonalty, as they did, subsequently the decrees of the
senate7 1 : hence probably their office got its name. This tem,ple
stood in the plebeian suburb, though not on the Aventine, but by
the Circus7ll: the valley of Murcia; like the neighbouring hill, had
been allotted to the commonalty by Ancus*. The goddess of agri­
culture was the immediate patroness of the class of free husband­
men: hence the property of all who insulted the plebeian magis­
trates was confiscated for the treasury of this temple : and here the
poor plebeians had bread distributed to them7 8 , of course under the
superintendence of the mdiles. This must have been the way of
laying out the produce of such fines as were imposed, not by the
whole nation, but by the plebs, in part on charges brought forward
by the rediles: who must needs have had the management of the
public chest of the commonalty.
The noblest and most salutary forms and institutions, which,
whether in civil or moral societies, are bequeathed from generation
to generation, after the lapse of centuries will prove defective.
However exquisitely fit they may have been when they were
framed, it would be necessary that the vital power in states and
churches should act instinctively, and evince a faculty of perpetu­
ally adapting itself to the occasion, as the ship Argo did when it
1369 L>.I,.,., ;.•, iv i,,-1.,.pi+nV'T<:<I ti<S1vo1, (the tribunes) xp1vouV'T<:<,. Diony­
sius VI. 90. T~ t1.p;x,t:tiov £,,.l 'TOV'T<f ~poiivT• (as keepers of the archives) ""'
t?Tl 'Tl)> "'""~"'· Zonaras vu. 15.
70 Zonaras proceeds: v,,.?epov J's ,.,.) "•,,._, ._• tt."77t:t, ,.,.) 1nv 7,,,, ,,,,;{i)v <:<'J'•P"'
im7pt:t1Tn1Tt1.v. According to Pliny however (H. N. xvm. 4) they had some
share in the management of the corn-trade even before the year 315.
71 Livy m. 55. 72 Nardini m. pp. 242, 243.
* See above pp. 270, 271.

73 Varro in Nonius v. pandere (1. 209).

472 IlISTORY OF ROME.

spoke, if such a fitness is to last. As it is however, they either
continue· without any outward alteration; and then are only the
more certain of becoming a mere lifeless shell: or they are gradually
developed and transformed; during which process their original
purpose is usually but little thought of, and often totally ~isunder­
stood: nay the condition of the persons for whose sake the institu­
tions were first enacted, will often undergo so great a change that
there ceases to be .any room for such a purpose. And then, should
any one perceive that what is now oppressing and harassing us
would not have existed but for these forms and the events which
fashioned them, he may unthinkingly turn his displeasure against
them; may wish, not that they were suitably modified, but that they
had never been ; and may e:i.;tol what they did away with, without
knowing what it was, without asking what and where he himself
would be, but for those institutions which now in their turn have
outlived themselves. ·
In this spirit does Quintus Cicero in the Dialogues on the Laws
inveigh against the tribunate: which indeed was in his days a source
of so much vexation and heartfelt sorrow to every honest citizen,
that one easily understands how they could overlook the good
which even in the desperate disorder of those times ougbt to have
been sought and might have been obtained from it. But the native
of Arpinum should have remembered that, but for this office, his
birthplace, which made him a Roman citizen, would have continued
to be an insignificant town of the Volscians; that, but for the esta­
blishment of the liberties of the plebeians, his beloved brother
would never have become, what by his consular power he had been
for a year,-and that year worth.a whole life-and what he was to
all eternity by the power of his min<l, the head of the Roman world:
yea, that the man who turned the weapons of the tribunate against
the father of his country, was a Claudius, whom nothing but ab1,1se
had made a tribune.
Perhaps even Marcus Cicero himself was not fully aware how
small and humble the power of the tribunate originally was: never­
theless he soars above prejudices, and declares, that Rome ought
either to have retained the monarchal ·government, or that it was
necessary to grant free<lom in good earnest, and not merely in
empty words, to the plebs 13H, • '

But for this institution, which was dictated by necessity, the

1374 De Leg. 111. 10. (25). Autexigendi reges non fuerunt: aut plebi re,
non verbo, danda libertas.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 473
two estates could not have subsisted side by side in a republic: a
king, even in an elective monarchy, might have prevented any
such necessity, from arising: in a hereditary one it would never
have been felt. Among the Greeks the prince, the offspring of a
heroic race and the ward of Jove, did not belong exclusively to any
part of the state: the inhabitants of the newly acquired territories,
if they resigned themselves heart and. soul to his sceptre, were
loved and cherished by him no less than the houses of the most
ancient of the ruling tribes: he was able to provide that every free
man should enjoy all the rights he was entitled to by his actual
condition and by his services: and many a disparity may be for­
gotten where there is a common bond of personal attachment. But
this conservative form of government was unknown to the Romans,
so far as our history goes back, as it was perhaps throughout the
whole of ancient Italy. No sooner had it disappeared among' the
Greeks, than the 'houses-began to oppress the commonalty, the
towns to oppress the country people; and with few exceptions it
was to their. own ruin. · For some powerful members of the houses
offered themselves to the disaffected as their champions, and com­
bining with the commonalty or the population of the surrounding
country, and with a party of the ruling burghers, made themselves
masters of the supreme power. This was the origin of the tyrants,
who were to be found in all parts of Greece during a period of 150
years down to about the 70th Olympiad: some few among them
were deserving of their odious name ; their authority in every In~
stance was founded on usurpation; in themselves they were often
benevolent, just, and wise; their influence was mostly salutary.
For the institutions which had newly grown up, had time to gain
strength and steadiness under their dictatorship; since they stood
as a personal guardian power by the side of the state; and, when
they laid down their authority, it was like a youth who had reached
the age of discretion under wise tutelage. Now because the old
governments refused to accede to any reasonable terms, revolutions
, ensued: and from this consequence the Roman patricians escaped,
not through their wisdom, not through their firmness, but through
the establishment of the tribunate. It is a profound remark of
Cicero'sl375 , that it was a check to the fierce bursts of the people's
fury, the task of resisting oppression being undertaken by their
chosen representatives, who in conducting the opposition moderated,
and often_ q.uieted it., To judge from the lessons of Greek history.

1375 De Leg. 111. lQ (24. 25).

l.-3K.
 HISTORY OF ROME.

it was no less fortunate for the patricians that the members of their
order were from the first excluded from this office; although this
arrangement was probably made by the plebeians for their own se­
curity.
By the leaders of this estate, who looked forward to the time
when their posterity ~hould partake in the curule honours, this
office was doubtless designed to be merely a transient institution ;
which was to be dropped when that end should be reached. Their
wishes were fulfilled : the plebs kept on increasing in power and
in dignity ; the patricians, from being a branch of the nation,
dwindled into an insignificant number of families : the n~blesse of
the two orders was united, and enlarged by fresh ennoblements:
the plebs as an estate had no longer any oppression to dread : yet
the tribunate did not pass away. But it now put on a totally differ­
ent character : it became a mode of representing the whole nation,
even the patricians ; although they neither el~cted nor were eligible
to it. From this time forward the tribunes are entitled to the name
of tribunes of the people, as we are in the habit of calling them
from the beginning; so much so indeed that it will hardly be poss­
ible to abstain altogether from using this name in the earlier ages,
·when as yet it was not appropriate 1376 • The people in a strict
sense is the whole nation, and its sovereign assembly as contra­
distinguished from the senate, such as it existed at Rome after the
Hortensian law: but this word of many meanings acts with an
intoxicating effect upon the mind; and the conscientious historian
will therefore be glad to find substitutes for it: fortunately the in­
stitutions of the middle ages have supplied one for the times of
convulsion and dissension, which is perfectly accurate and sober.
In the later history of the Roman republic we find the tribunician
power carried to such a pitch by the changes in the state of things
and by its own usurpations, that it overtops the consuls and the
senate, nay the people itself: and yet no one had learned from the,
experience of the past that those branches of the state, which were
then in need of the same shelter as the plebeians had once needed,
had a right to receive it. In the course of centuries things went so·
far that the tribunes no longer stood over against the supreme au­
thority as representatives of the nation, but were tyrants elected for
.
the term of their office : a kind of national convention
. : under a
1376 The old German writers call the tribunes Zunftmeister (masters of
guilds or aldermen), which has an odd sound enough: but in selecting this
name they were guided by a. just feeling that the plebs stood in the same
relation to the houses as the guilds did.
 HISTORY OF ROME. 475
notion like that which prevailed during the revolutionary frenzy
that the full power3 nominally conferred by an election, where the
greater part of the constituents vote without at all knowing what
they are doing, bestow an unlimited authority. This however was
only the last stage of the tribunate : the century and a half, on the
history of which we are now about to enter; are the period of its
blameless struggles in behalf of its own estate and of the whole
nation ; struggles by which the greatness and glory of Rome were
achieved and secured for a still longer period•

END OF VOL. I.
•